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Chapter I

Horace Jewdwine had made the most remarkable of his many remarkable discoveries. At least he thought he had. He could not be quite sure, which was his excuse for referring it to his cousin Lucia, whose instinct (he would not call it judgement) in these matters was infallible--strangely infallible for so young a girl. What, he wondered, would she say to Savage Keith Rickman?

On Saturday, when he first came down into Devonshire, he would have been glad to know. But to-day, which was a Tuesday, he was not interested in Rickman. To eat strawberries all morning; to lie out in the hammock all afternoon, under the beach-tree on the lawn of Court House; to let the peace of the old green garden sink into him; to look at Lucia and forget, utterly forget, about his work (the making of discoveries), that was what he wanted. But Lucia wanted to talk, and to talk about Rickman earnestly as if he were a burning question, when even lying in the hammock Jewdwine was so hot that it bothered him to talk at all.

He was beginning to be sorry that he had introduced him--the exciting topic, that is to say, not the man; for Rickman you could scarcely introduce, not at any rate to Lucia Harden.

"Well, Lucia?" He pronounced her name in the Italian manner, "Loo-chee-a," with a languid stress on the vowels, and his tone conveyed a certain weary but polite forbearance.

Lucia herself, he noticed, had an ardent look, as if a particularly interesting idea had just occurred to her. He wished it hadn't. An idea of Lucia's would commit him to an opinion of his own; and at the moment Jewdwine was not prepared to abandon himself to anything so definite and irretrievable. He had not yet made up his mind about Rickman, and did not want to make it up now. Certainty was impossible owing to his somewhat embarrassing acquaintance with the man. That, again, was where Lucia had come in. Her vision of him would be free and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence.

Meanwhile, Rickman's poem, or rather the first two Acts of his neo-classic drama, Helen in Leuce, lay on Lucia's lap. Jewdwine had obtained it under protest and with much secrecy. He had promised Rickman, solemnly, not to show it to a soul; but he had shown it to Lucia. It was all right, he said, so long as he refrained from disclosing the name of the person who had written it. Not that she would have been any the wiser if he had.

"And it was you who discovered him?" Her voice lingered with a peculiarly tender and agreeable vibration on the "you." He closed his eyes and let that, too, sink into him.

"Yes," he murmured, "nobody else has had a hand in it--as yet."

"And what are you going to do with him now you have discovered him?"

He opened his eyes, startled by the uncomfortable suggestion. It had not yet occurred to him that the discovery of Rickman could entail any responsibility whatever.

"I don't know that I'm going to do anything with him. Unless some day I use him for an article."

"Oh, Horace, is that the way you treat your friends?"

He smiled. "Yes Lucy, sometimes, when they deserve it."

"You haven't told me your friend's name?"

"No. I betrayed his innocent confidence sufficiently in showing you his play. I can't tell you his name."

"After all, his name doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't matter. Very likely you'll hear enough of it some day. You haven't told me what you think of him."

"I don't know what I think--But then, I don't know him."

"No," he said, roused to interest by her hesitation, "you don't know him. That's the beauty of it."

She gave the manuscript back into his hands. "Take him away. He makes me feel uncomfortable."

"To tell the truth, Lucy, he makes me feel uncomfortable, too."

"Why?"

"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up and stake your reputation on him--and all the time you can't be sure whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire."

His eyes were fixed on the title page as if fascinated by the words, Helen in Leuce.

"But this is not bad--it's not bad for two and twenty."

"Only two and twenty?"

"That's all. It looks as if he were made for immortality."

She turned to him that ardent gaze which made the hot day hotter.

"Dear Horace, you're going to do great things for him."

The worst of having a cousin who adores you is that magnificence is expected of you, regularly and as a matter of course. He was not even sure that Lucia did not credit him with power to work miracles. The idea was flattering but also somewhat inconvenient.

"I don't know about great things. I should like to do something. The question is what. He's a little unfortunate in--in his surroundings, and he's been ill, poor fellow. If one could give him a change. If one were only rich and could afford to send him abroad for a year. I had thought of asking him down to Oxford."

"And why didn't you?"

"Well, you know, one gets rather crowded up with things in term time."

Lucia looked thoughtfully at the refined, luxurious figure in the hammock. Horace was entitled to the hammock, for he had been ill. He was entitled also to the ministrations of his cousin Lucia. Lucia spent her time in planning and doing kind things, and, from the sudden luminous sweetness of her face, he gathered that something of the sort was in preparation now.

It was. "Horace," she said, "would you like to ask him here?"

"No, Lucy, I wouldn't. I don't think it would do."

"But why not--if he's your friend?"

"If he's my friend."

"You said he was your friend. You did, you know." (Another awkward consequence of a cousin's adoration; she is apt to remember and attach importance to your most trivial utterances.)

"Pardon me, I said he was my find."

"Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the City--in a shop."

She smiled at the rhythmic utterance. The tragedy of the revelation was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.

"The shop doesn't matter."

"No, but he does. You couldn't stand him, Lucia. You see, for one thing, he sometimes drops his aitches."

"Well, if he does,--he'll be out all day, and there's the open country to drop them in. I really don't mind, if you'd like to ask him. Do you think he'd like to be asked?"

"There's no possible doubt about that."

"Then ask him. Ask him now. You can't do it when father's not at home."

Jewdwine repressed a smile. Even now, from the windows of the east wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique. It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil. If all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was, if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.

And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself would not be staying at Court House. Really, he reflected. Lucia ought to get some lady to live with her. It was the correct thing, and therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it. An expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.

"Father won't mind," she said.

"No, but I should." He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the question.

She sat still, turning over the pages of the manuscript which she had again taken on her lap.

"I suppose he is very dreadful. Still, I think we ought to do something for him."

"And what would you propose to do?"

There was an irritating smile on her cousin's face. He was thinking, "So she wants to patronize him, does she?"

He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for she always knew. He only said, "I don't exactly see you playing Beatrice to his Dante."

Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right. The Hardens had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most superbly patronizing women he knew. And Rickman might or might not be a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great lady in her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he smiled again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more irritating than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.

"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing him down here."

He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if he were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which distinguishes his Helen. Really, for two and twenty, he is marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to her vagueness, "his Helen is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold, polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations, made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but she had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford critic had not been able to see.

The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the enfolding hills.

Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to Rickman.

But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.

"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool of the evening."

"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."

Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which appealed to him was the languor of fatigue.

"You might play to me, now," he said.

She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in which, if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no reproach, only a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered what she was thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and would not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction. "No, he is not selfish, he is only ill."

And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into the house.

His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her figure.

Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her charm. He could not say positively wherein her beauty consisted, therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her features, (though it was impossible to think of them, or anything about her as incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their subtlety. Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did not commit him to any irretrievable opinion.

But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the look out to go one better, and to catch you tripping. Her lucidity was remarkable; but it served to show up other people's strong points rather than her own. Lucia did not impress you as being clever, and Jewdwine, who had a clever man's natural distaste for clever women, admired his cousin's intellect, as well he might, for it was he who had taught her how to use it. Her sense of humour, too (for Lucia was dangerously gifted), that sense which more than any of her senses can wreck a woman--he would have liked her just as well if she had had none; but some, no doubt, she needed, if only to save her from the situations to which her kindness and her innocence exposed her; and she had just the right amount and no more. Heavens! Supposing, without it, she had met Keith Rickman and had yielded to the temptation to be kind to him! Even in the heat Jewdwine shivered at the thought.

He put it from him, he put Rickman altogether from his mind. It was not to think about Rickman that he came down to Court House. On a day as hot as this, he wanted nothing but to keep cool. The gentle oscillation of the hammock in the green shadows of the beech-tree symbolized this attitude towards Rickman and all other ardent questions.

Still, it was not disagreeable to know that if he could only make up his mind to something very definite and irretrievable indeed, Court House would one day be his. It was the only house in England that came up to his idea of what a country house should be. A square Tudor building with two short, gable-ended wings, thrown out at right angles to its front; three friendly grey walls enclosing a little courtyard made golden all day long with sunshine from the south. Court House was older than anything near it except Harmouth Bridge and the Parish Church. Standing apart in its own green lands, it looked older than the young red earth beneath it, a mass upheaved from the grey foundations of the hills. Its face, turned seawards, was rough and pitted with the salt air; thousands upon thousands of lichens gave it a greenish bloom, with here and there a rusty patch on groin and gable. It contained the Harden Library, the Harden Library, one of the finest private collections in the country. It contained also his cousin Lucia.

He had always loved Court House, but not always his cousin Lucia. The scholarly descendant of a long line of scholars, Jewdwine knew that he had been a favourite with his grandfather, Sir Joseph Harden, the Master of Lazarus, he was convinced (erroneously) that he was a Harden by blood and by temperament, and of course if he had only been a Harden by name, and not a Jewdwine, Court House and the great Harden Library would have been his instead of his cousin Lucia's. He knew that his grandfather had wished them to be his. Lucia's mother was dead long ago; and when his uncle Sir Frederick definitely renounced the domestic life, Lucia and Lucia alone stood between him and the inheritance that should have been his. This hardly constituted a reason for being fond of Lucia.

His grandfather had wished him to be fond of her. But not until Jewdwine was five and twenty and began to feel the primordial manhood stirring in his scholarly blood did he perceive that his cousin Lucia was not a hindrance but a way. The way was so obvious that it was no wonder that he did not see it all at once. He did not really see it till Sir Joseph sent for him on his death-bed.

"There's been some mistake, Horace," Sir Joseph had then said. "Your mother should have been the boy and your uncle Frederick the girl. Then Lucia would have been a Jewdwine, and you a Harden."

And Horace had said, "I'm afraid I can't be a Harden, sir; but is there any reason why Lucia--?"

"I was coming to that," said Sir Joseph. But he never came to it. Horace, however, was in some way aware that the same idea had occurred to both of them. Whatever it was, the old man had died happy in it.

There was no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing could have been more soothing than the golden concord of that understanding.

Needless to say if Lucia had been anybody but Lucia, such a solution would have been impossible. He was fastidious. He would not have married a woman simply because his grandfather wished it; and he could not have married a woman simply because she inherited property that ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman who would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred, nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused, and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."

"So am I."

"Yes, but you don't look it. What are you thinking of?"

She turned, and they walked together towards the house.

"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about that friend of yours."

"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"

"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want to be kind to him?"

"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to everybody. It really doesn't do."

She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.

That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.

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Chapter II

It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.

The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with a decorated façade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary's. Whether you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west, you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so new. Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over the pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal of dazzling globes hung over the doorway at the corner; there, as you turned, the sombre windows of the second-hand department stretched half way down the side street; here, in the great thoroughfare, the newest of new books stood out, solicitous and alluring, in suits of blazing scarlet and vivid green, of vellum and gilt, of polished leather that shone like amber and malachite and lapis lazuli.

Within, a wall broken by a wide and lofty arch divided the front from the back shop. On the right of the arch was the mahogany pew of the cashier, on the left, a tall pillar stove radiating intolerable heat. Four steps led through the arch into the back shop, the floor of which was raised in a sort of platform. On the platform was a table, and at the table sat the young man compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

Front shop and back shop reeked with the smells of new mahogany, dust, pillar-stove, gum, hot-pressed paper and Russia leather. He sat in the middle of them, in an atmosphere so thick that it could be seen hanging about him like an aura, luminous in the glare of the electric light. His slender, nervous hands worked rapidly, with a business-like air of dexterity and dispatch. But every now and then he raised his head and stared for quite a long time at the round, white, foolish face of the clock, and whenever he did this his eyes were the eyes of a young man who has no adequate sense of his surroundings.

The remarkable thing about the new shop was that already, like a bar or a restaurant, it drew to it a certain group of young men, punctually, irresistibly. A small group--you could almost count them on the fingers of one hand--they came from Fleet Street, from the Temple, from the Junior Journalists' Club over the way. They were never seen looking in at the windows or hanging about the counter; they were not the least bit of good to the shop, those customers. But they were evidently some good to the young man. Whatever they did or did not do, they always ended by drifting to the platform, to his table. They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power, his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.

It lay partly, no doubt, in his appearance; not, no, not at all, in his make-up. He wore, like a thousand city clerks, a high collar, a speckled tie, a straight, dark blue serge suit. But in spite of the stiffness thus imposed on him, he had, unaccountably, the shy, savage beauty of an animal untamed, uncaught. He belonged to the slender, nervous, fair type; but the colour proper to it had been taken out of him by the shop. His head presented the utmost clearness of line compatible with irregularity of outline; and his face (from its heavy square forehead to its light square jaw) was full of strange harmonies, adjustments, compensations. His chin, rather long in a front view, rather prominent in profile, balanced the powerful proportions of his forehead. His upper lip, in spite of its slender arch, betrayed a youthful eagerness of the senses; but this effect was subtilized by the fineness of his lower lip, and, when they closed, it disappeared in the sudden, serious straightening of the lines. Even his nose (otherwise a firm feature, straight in the bridge and rather broad at the end) became grave or eager as the pose of the head hid or revealed the nostrils. He had queer eyes, of a thick dark blue, large, though deep set, showing a great deal of iris and very little white. Without being good-looking he was good to look at, when you could look long enough to find all these things out. He did not like being looked at. If you tried to hold him that way, his eyes were all over the place, seeking an escape; but they held you, whether you liked it or not.

It was uncanny, that fascination. If he had chosen to exert it in the interests of his shop he could presumably have cleaned those friendly young men out any day. But he never did exert it. Surrounded by wares whose very appearance was a venal solicitation, he never hinted by so much as the turn of a phrase that there was anything about him to be bought. And after what had passed between them, they felt that to hint it themselves--to him--would have been the last indelicacy. If they ever asked the price of a book it was to propitiate the grim grizzled fellow, so like a Methodist parson, who glared at them from the counter.

They kept their discovery to themselves, as if it had been something too precious to be handled, as if its charm, the poetry, the pathos of it must escape under discussion. But any of them who did compare notes agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt--no--no, he skipped--his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it terrible that it should happen at all--to him. They touched it tenderly; if it was not exactly part of his poetry it was part of his pathos. The shop was responsible for it. He ought never, never to have been there.

And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained by what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he should not know.

He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of everything, his great classic drama, Helen in Leuce, was lying finished in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the last month those very modern poems that he called Saturnalia had been careering through the columns of The Planet. But at the moment he was mainly supported by the coming of Easter.

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Chapter III

The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and well-appointed. But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a boy. There was something soothing in its very obscurity and retirement. He could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully reading his Homer. In that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms were dimmed with familiarity and dirt. His dreams took shape before him, they came and went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision with reality. There was hardly any part of it that was not consecrated by some divine visitation. It was in the corner by the window, standing on a step-ladder and fumbling in the darkness for a copy of Demosthenes, De Corona, that he lit on his first Idea. From his seat behind the counter, staring, as was his custom, into the recess where the coal-scuttle was, he first saw the immortal face of Helen in Leuce.

Here, all that beautiful world of thought lay open to the terrific invasion of things. His dreams refused to stand out with sufficient distinctness from a background of coloured bindings, plate glass and mahogany. They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent contours of customers. A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained only by dint of much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often as not Mr. Rickman's eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering the cashier's eye in its passage from the clock to the paper.

But (as he reflected with some humour) though Mr. Rickman's ideas so frequently miscarried, owing to that malignant influence, his genius, like Nature irresistible and indestructible, compelled him perpetually to bring forth. Exposed on his little daïs or platform, in hideous publicity, he suffered the divine labour and agony of creation. He was the slave of his passion and his hour.

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Chapter IV

A wave of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the shop, strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it. And through it all, with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into his young senses a something delicious and disturbing, faintly discernible as the Spring.

He thrust his work from him, tilted back his chair at a dangerous angle, and began reviewing his engagements for the coming Bank Holiday.

He was only three and twenty, and at three and twenty an infinite measure of life can be pressed into the great three days. He saw in fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all the gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of Saturnalia. For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama, but of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and of a great many things besides. He had made his plans long beforehand, and was prepared to consign to instant perdition the person or thing that should interfere with them. Good Friday morning, an hour's cycling before breakfast in Regent's Park, by way of pumping some air into his lungs, then, ten hours at least of high Parnassian leisure, of dalliance in Academic shades; he saw himself wooing some reluctant classic, or, far more likely, flirting with his own capricious and bewildering muse. (In a world of prose it is only by such divine snatches that poets are made) Friday evening, dinner at his club, the Junior Journalists'. Saturday morning, recovery from dinner at the Junior Journalists'. Saturday afternoon, to Hampstead or the Hippodrome with Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who lived in his boarding-house and never had any fun to speak of. Saturday night, supper with--well, with Miss Poppy Grace of the Jubilee Variety Theatre. He had a sudden vision of Poppy as he was wont to meet her in delightful intimacy, instantaneously followed by her image that flaunted on the posters out there in the Strand, Poppy as she appeared behind the foot-lights, in red silk skirts and black silk stockings, skimming, whirling, swaying, and deftly shaking her foot at him. Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably, with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas. Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally large, all made out of Mr. Rickman's brain. And in the midst of the ideas a figure insanely whirled, till it became a mere wheel of flying skirts and tossing limbs.

At this point Mr. Rickman caught the cashier's eye looking at him over the little mahogany rails of his pew, and he began wondering how on earth the cashier would behave when they loosed him out for the Bank Holiday. Then he set to and wrote hard at the Quarterly Catalogue. In all London there was not a more prolific or versatile writer than Savage Keith Rickman. But if in ninety-two you had asked him for his masterpiece, his magnum opus, his life-work, he would mention nothing that he had written, but refer you, soberly and benignly, to that colossal performance, the Quarterly Catalogue.

"Vandam: Amours of Great Men (a little soiled). Rare. 30s." He was in the middle of the Vs now and within measurable distance of the end. Business being slack in the front shop, he finished earlier than usual, and actually found himself with nearly a whole hour upon his hands before dinner. He had half a mind to spend it at his club, the Junior Journalists', in the side street over the way.

Only half a mind; for Mr. Rickman entertained the most innocent beliefs with regard to that club of his. He was not yet sure whether it belonged to him or he to it; but in going to the Junior Journalists' he conceived himself to be going into society. So extreme was his illusion.

Mr. Rickman's place was in the shop and his home was in a boarding house, and for years he had thought of belonging to that club; but quite hopelessly, as of a thing beyond attainment. It had never occurred to him that anything could come of those invasions of the friendly young men. Yet this was what had come of them. He was friends, under the rose, that is to say, over the counter, with Horace Jewdwine of Lazarus College, Oxford. Jewdwine had proposed him on his own merits, somebody else had seconded him (he supposed) on Jewdwine's, and between them they had smuggled him in. This would be his first appearance as a Junior Journalist. And he might well feel a little diffident about it; for, though some of the members knew him, he could not honestly say he knew any of them, except Rankin (of The Planet) who possibly mightn't, and Jewdwine who certainly wouldn't, be there. But the plunge had to be made some time; he might as well make it now.

From the threshold of the Junior Journalists' he looked back across the side street, as across a gulf, at the place he had just left. His eyes moved from the jutting sign-board at the corner, announcing Gentlemen's Libraries Purchased, to the legend that ran above the window, blazoned in letters of gold:

Isaac Rickman: New & Second-Hand Bookseller.

His connexion with it was by no means casual and temporary. It was his father's shop.

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Chapter V

The little booksellers of the Strand, in their death struggle against Rickman's, never cursed that house more heartily than did the Junior Journalists, in their friendly, shabby little den, smelling of old leather and tobacco and the town. They complained that it cut on two-thirds of the light from the front windows of the reading-room. Not that any of them were ever known to read in it. They used it chiefly as a place to talk in, for which purpose little illumination was required.

To-night one of the windows in question was occupied by a small group of talkers isolated from the rest. There was Mackinnon, of The Literary Observer. There were the three wild young spirits of The Planet, Stables, who had launched it with frightful impetus into space (having borrowed a sum sufficient for the purpose), Maddox, who controlled its course, and Rankin, whose brilliance made it twinkle so brightly in the firmament. With them, but emphatically not of them, was Horace Jewdwine, of Lazarus, who had come up from Oxford to join the staff of The Museion.

Jewdwine and Mackinnon, both secure of a position and a salary, looked solemn and a little anxious; but the men of The Planet, having formed themselves into a sort of unlimited liability company, and started a brand new "weekly" of their own (upon no sort of security beyond their bare brains) were as persons without a single care, worry or responsibility. They were exchanging ideas in an off-hand and light-hearted manner, the only stipulation being that the ideas must be new; for, by some unwritten law of the club, the conversational currency was liable at any moment to be called in.

This evening, however, they had hit on a topic almost virgin from the mint.

"S.K.R.? Who is he? What is he?" said Mackinnon.

"I can't tell you what he is; but I can pretty soon tell you what he's not," said Stables. He was a very young man with a white face and red eyelids, who looked as if he sat up all night and went to bed in the day-time, as indeed he generally did.

"Omnis negatio est determinatio," murmured Jewdwine, without looking up from the letter he was trying to write.

"What has he done?" persisted Mackinnon.

"He's done a great many remarkable things," said Rankin; "things almost as remarkable as himself."

"Who unearthed him?"

"I did," said Rankin, so complacently that the deep lines relaxed round the five copper-coloured bosses that were his chin and cheeks and brow. (The rest of Rankin's face was spectacles and moustache.)

"Oh, did you?" said Maddox. Maddox was a short man with large shoulders; heavy browed, heavy jowled, heavy moustached. Maddox's appearance belied him; he looked British when he was half Celt; he struck you as overbearing when he was only top-heavy; he spoke as if he was angry when he was only in fun, as you could see by his eyes. Little babyish blue eyes they were with curly corners, a gay light in the sombre truculence of his face. They looked cautiously round.

"I can tell you a little tale about S.K.R. You know the last time Smythe was ill--?"

"You mean drunk."

"Well--temporarily extinguished. S.K.R., who knows his music-halls, was offered Smythe's berth. We delicately intimated to him that if he liked at any time to devote a little paragraph to Miss Poppy Grace, he was at perfect liberty to do so."

"A liberty he interpreted as poetic licence."

"Nothing of the sort. He absolutely declined the job."

"Why?"

"Well--the marvellous boy informed me that he was too intimate with the lady to write about her. At any rate with that noble impartiality which distinguishes the utterances of The Planet."

"Steady, man. He never told ye that!" said Mackinnon.

"I didn't say he told me, I said he informed me."

"And whar's the differ'nce? I don't see it at all."

"Trepan him, trepan him."

Stables took out his penknife and indicated by dumb show a surgical operation on Mackinnon's dome-like head.

"I gathered it," continued Maddox suavely, "from his manner. I culled his young thought like a flower."

"Perhaps," Rankin suggested, "he was afraid of compromising Poppy."

"He might have left that subtle consideration to Pilkington."

"That was it. He scented Dicky's hand in it, and wasn't particularly anxious to oblige him. The point of the joke is that he happens to owe Dicky a great deal more than he can conveniently pay. That'll give you some faint notion of the magnificence of his cheek."

Stables was impressed. He wondered what sort of young man it could be who had the moral courage to oppose Dicky Pilkington at such a moment. He could not have done it himself. Dicky Pilkington was the great and mysterious power at the back of The Planet.

"But this isn't the end of it. I told him, for his future guidance and encouragement, that he had mistaken cause and effect--that little variety artistes, like other people, are not popular because they are written about, but written about because they are popular--that The Planet is the organ of public opinion, not of private opinions; in short, that he wasn't in it, at all. I thought I'd sat on him till he was about flat--and the very next week he comes bounding in with his Saturnalia, as he calls them."

"That was your moment. Why didn't you rise up in your majesty and r-r-reject them?"

"Couldn't. They were too damned good." Maddox smiled at the reminiscence. "I wasn't going to let him sign them, but he took the wind out of my sails by stating beforehand that he didn't want to--that if I didn't mind--mind, if you please--he'd very much rather not. It's only the last week (when the Saturnalia were getting better and better) that he graciously permitted his initials to appear. S.K.R.--Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord!" said Rankin; "what must he be like?"

"Ask Jewdwine," said Stables; "he's Jewdwine's man."

"Excuse me," said Maddox, "he is mine. I say, Jewdwine, what is he like?"

Jewdwine did not respond very eagerly; he wanted to get on with his letter. But the club had another unwritten law as to writing. If a majority of members desired to write, silence was vigorously insisted on. Any number short of a majority wrote as best they could. For this unfortunate scribe there could be no concession; he was in a minority of one.

"If"--said he, "you can imagine the soul of a young Sophocles, battling with that of a--of a junior journalist in the body of a dissipated little Cockney--"

"Can't," said Stables. "Haven't got enough imagination."

"The child of 'Ellas and of Ollywell Street'--innocent of--er--the rough breathing," suggested Maddox.

As it was now seven o'clock, and the Junior Journalists were dropping off one by one to the dining-room below, the young men of The Planet began to stretch their legs, and raise their voices, and behave like young men who believe their privacy to be inviolable and complete. They soon had the place to themselves, except for one person whose entrance had been covered by the outgoing stream; and he had delicately turned his back on them, and taken a seat in the farthest window, where his unobtrusive presence could be no possible hindrance to conversation.

"I've seen him after supper," said Maddox. He was obliged to speak rather loudly, because of the noise that came up from the overcrowded dining-room.

"Well, then, how did he strike you?"

Maddox's eyes curled with limpid, infantile devilry.

"Well, I daresay he might be a bit of a bounder when he's sober, but he's a perfect little gentleman when he's drunk. Softens him down somehow."

"In vino veritas--a true gentleman at heart."

"One of Nature's gentlemen. I know 'em," said Stables.

"One of Art's gentlemen," interposed Jewdwine severely, "and a very fine gentleman too, if you take him that way."

Jewdwine raised his head from his letter and looked round uneasily. Personalities were not altogether to his taste; besides, he was really anxious to finish that letter. He caught sight of a back at the other window.

"I think," said he quietly, "this conversation had better cease."

The owner of the back had moved, a little ostentatiously. He now got up and crossed the room. The back was still towards the group of talkers. Jewdwine followed its passage. He was fascinated. He gasped.

He could have sworn to that back anywhere, with its square but slender shoulders, its defiant swing from the straight hips, the head tossed a little backwards as if to correct the student's tendency to stoop. He looked from the back to Maddox. Maddox could not see what he saw, but his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine's.

Their voices were inaudible enough now.

"Do you know who it is?"

"I should think I did. It's the man himself."

"How truly damnable," said Rankin. After those words there was a silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his correspondence.

It was Maddox who recovered first. "Call him what you like," said he, in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, "I consider him an uncommonly good sort. A bit of a bounder, but no end of a good sort."

The others were evidently impressed by this bold though desperate policy. Maddox himself was inclined to think that it had saved the situation, but he was anxious to make sure. Edging his chair by slow degrees, he turned discreetly round. With the tail of his eye he could see "the man himself" standing at the far end of the room. He saw too that his own effort, though supreme, had been unavailing. It had deceived no one, least of all S.K.R. "The man himself" stood on the very hearth of the club, with his back to the fireplace. It was the attitude of mastery, a mastery the more superb because unconscious. His eyes too, were the eyes of a master, twinkling a little as to their light, but steady as to their direction, being fixed on Maddox. He was smiling.

There was nothing malignant, or bitter, or sardonic about that smile. No devilry of delight at their confusion. No base abandonment of the whole countenance to mirth, but a curious one-sided smile, implying delicacies, reservations. A slow smile, reminiscent, ruminant, appreciative; it expressed (if so subtle and refined a thing could be said to express anything) a certain exquisite enjoyment of the phrases in which they had defined him.

And seeing it, Maddox said to himself, "He isn't a gentleman. He's something more."

In that moment the Celtic soul of Maddox had recognized its master, and had sworn to him unhesitating allegiance.

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Chapter VI

It was not until Rankin and the others had left the room that Jewdwine had courage to raise his head tentatively. He had only seen that young man's back, and he still clung to the hope that it might not be Rickman's, after all.

He looked up as steadily as he dared. Oh, no doubt that it was Rickman's back; no doubt, too, that it was his, Jewdwine's, duty to go up and speak to him. The young man had changed his place; he was at his window again, contemplating--as Jewdwine reflected with a pang of sympathy--the shop. So profound, so sacred almost, was his absorption that Jewdwine hesitated in his approach.

"Is it Rickman?" he asked, still tentative.

"Mr. Jewdwine!" Rickman's soul leapt to Jewdwine's from the depths; but the "Mister" marked the space it had had to travel. "When did you come up?"

"Three hours ago." ("He looks innocent," said Jewdwine to himself.)

"Then you weren't prepared for that?"

Jewdwine followed his fascinated gaze. He smiled faintly.

"You haven't noticed our new departure? We not only purchase Gentlemen's Libraries, but we sell the works of persons who may or may not be gentlemen."

Jewdwine felt profoundly uncomfortable. Rickman's face preserved its inimitable innocence, but he continued to stare fixedly before him.

"Poor fellow," thought Jewdwine, "he must have heard those imbecilities." He felt horribly responsible, responsible to the Club for the behaviour of Rickman and responsible to Rickman for the behaviour of the Club. What could he do to make it up to him? Happy thought--he would ask him to dinner at--yes, at his sister's, Miss Jewdwine's, house at Hampstead. That was to say, if his cousin, Lucia Harden, did not happen to be staying there. He was not quite sure how Rickman would strike that most fastidious of young ladies. And Rankin had said he drank.

In the light of Lucia Harden's and his sister's possible criticism, he considered him more carefully than he had done before.

The contrast between the two men was certainly rather marked. A gentleman can be neither more nor less than a gentleman, and Rickman, in a sense not altogether intended by Maddox, was decidedly more. His individuality was too exuberant, too irrepressible. He had the restless, emphatic air of a man who has but little leisure and is too obviously anxious to make the most of what he has. He always seemed to be talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly, too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight elision of the aspirate observed by some of them. But then, he had a voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into forgetfulness of these enormities.

It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman's. He looked neither more nor less than he was--an Oxford don, developing into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow. There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined. You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out of sight.

Rickman had always looked up to him. For Jewdwine, as Rankin had intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R. He was always discovering him. Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was always losing sight of him in between. These lapses in their intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense), but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City. He felt responsible for that, too.

Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism. But he mistook its nature and its grounds.

"Don't suppose," said he, "I'm ashamed of the shop. It isn't that. I wasn't ashamed of our other place--that little rat 'ole in the City."

Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.

"--But I am ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern. It's so brutally big. It can't live, you know, without sucking the life out of the little booksellers. They mayn't have made a great thing out of it, but they were happy enough before we came here."

"I never thought of it in that light."

"Haven't you? I have."

It was evident that little Rickman was deeply moved. His sentiments did him credit, and he deserved to be asked to dinner. At Hampstead? No--no, not at Hampstead; here, at the Club. The Club was the proper thing; a public recognition of him was the amende honorable. Besides, after all, it was the Club, not Jewdwine, that had offended, and it was right that the Club should expiate its offence.

"What are you doing at Easter?" he asked.

Rickman stroked his upper lip and smiled as if cherishing a joy as secret and unborn as his moustache. He recited a selection from the tale of his engagements.

"Can you dine with me here on Saturday? You're free, then, didn't you say?"

Rickman hesitated. That was not what he had said. He was anything but free, for was he not engaged for that evening to Miss Poppy Grace? He was pulled two ways, a hard pull. He admired Jewdwine with simple, hero-worshipping fervour; but he also admired Miss Poppy Grace. Again, he shrank from mentioning an engagement of that sort to Jewdwine, while, on the other hand concealment was equally painful, being foreign to his nature.

So he flushed a little as he replied, "Thanks awfully, I'm afraid I can't. I'm booked that night to Poppy Grace."

The flush deepened. Besides his natural sensitiveness on the subject of Miss Poppy Grace, he suffered tortures not wholly sentimental whenever he had occasion to mention her by her name. Poppy Grace--he felt that somehow it did not give you a very high idea of the lady, and that in this it did her an injustice. He could have avoided it by referring to her loftily as Miss Grace; but this course, besides being unfamiliar would have savoured somewhat of subterfuge. So he blurted it all out with an air of defiance, as much as to say that when you had called her Poppy Grace you had said the worst of her.

Jewdwine's face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was incomprehensible to Jewdwine.

"I didn't know you cultivated that sort of person."

"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too light for that.

"How long have you known her?"

"About six months, on and off."

"Oh, only on and off."

"On and off the stage, I mean. And that's knowledge," said Rickman. "Anybody can know them on; but it's not one man in a thousand knows them off--really knows them."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

He changed the subject. In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested; but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.

Jewdwine had a weak digestion. When he sat at the high table, peering at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of undergraduates in Hall.

Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman's youth. When it came to women, Rickman was impossible.

Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club. Edith would be annoyed if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not good. But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny cab, he would save one and tenpence.

"And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote Helen in Leuce was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."

Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty accurately.

"Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow. A poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal, stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art."

As he looked up at Rickman's, blazing with all its lights, he felt that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine's nature, something half-human, half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly, "Won't you hear me? I've so much to ask, so much to say. So many ideas, and you're the only man that can understand them." Jewdwine impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious understanding.

The question was, having understood Rickman, having discovered in him a neglected genius, having introduced him to the Club and asked him to dinner on the strength of it, how much further was he prepared to go? Why--provided he was sure of the genius, almost any length, short of introducing him to the ladies of his family. But was he sure? Savage Rickman was young, and youth is deceptive. Supposing he--Jewdwine--was deceived? Supposing the genius were to elude him, leaving him saddled with the man? What on earth should he do with him?

Things had been simpler in the earlier days of their acquaintance, when the counter stood between them, and formed a firm natural barrier to closer intercourse. Nobody, not even Jewdwine, knew what that handshake across the counter had meant for Rickman; how his soul had hungered and thirsted for Jewdwine's society; how, in "the little rat'ole in the City," it had consumed itself with longing. It was his first great passion, a passion that waited upon chance; to be gratified for five minutes, ten minutes at the most. Once Jewdwine had hung about the shop for half an hour talking; the interview being broken by Rickman's incessant calls to the counter. Once, they had taken a walk together down Cheapside, which from that moment became a holy place. Then came the day when, at Jewdwine's invitation, Helen in Leuce travelled down from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to Harmouth. Her neo-classic beauty appealed to Jewdwine's taste (and to the taste of Jewdwine's cousin); he recognized in Rickman a disciple, and was instantly persuaded of his genius. At one bound Rickman had leapt the barrier of the counter; and here he was, enthusiastic and devoted. To be sure, his devotion was not fed largely upon praise; for, unlike the younger man, Jewdwine admired but sparingly. Neither was it tainted with any thought of material advantage. Jewdwine was very free with his criticism and advice; but, beyond these high intellectual aids, it never occurred to Rickman that he had anything to gain by Jewdwine's friendship. Discipleship is the purest of all human relations.

Jewdwine divined this purity, and was touched by it. He prepared to accept a certain amount of responsibility. He looked at his watch. He could still get to Hampstead by eight o'clock, if he took a cab--say,--twenty minutes. He could spare him another ten. The Junior Journalists were coming back from their dinner and the room would soon be crowded. He took his disciple's arm in a protecting manner and steered him into a near recess. He felt that the ten minutes he was about to give him would be decisive in the young man's career.

"You've still got to find your formula. Not to have found your formula," he said solemnly, "is not to have found yourself."

"Perhaps I haven't been looking in very likely places," said Rickman, nobly touched, as he always was by the more personal utterances of the master.

"The Jubilee Variety Theatre, for instance. Do you go there to find the ideal, or in pursuit of the fugitive actuality?"

"Whichever you like to call it. Its name on the programme is Miss Poppy Grace."

"Look here, Rickman," said Jewdwine, gently; "when are you going to give up this business?"

"Which business?"

"Well, at the moment I referred to your situation in the Gin Palace of Art--"

"I can't chuck it just yet. There's my father, you see. It would spoil all his pleasure in that new plate-glass and mahogany devilry. He's excited about it; wants to make it a big thing--"

"So he puts a big man into it?"

"Oh, well, I must see him started."

He spoke simply, as of a thing self-evident and indisputable. Jewdwine admired.

"You're quite right. You are handicapped. Heavily handicapped. So, for Goodness' sake, don't weight yourself any more. If you can't drop the Gin Palace, drop Miss Poppy Grace."

"Poppy Grace? She weighs about as much as a feather."

"Drop her, drop her, all the same."

"I can't. She wouldn't drop. She'd float."

"Don't float with her."

As he rose he spoke slowly and impressively. "What you've got to do is to pull yourself together. You can't afford to be dissolute, or even dissipated."

Rickman looked hard at Jewdwine's boots. Irreproachable boots, well made, well polished, unspotted by the world. And the only distinguishable word in Rickman's answer was "Life." And as he said "Life" he blushed like a girl when for the first time she says "Love," a blush of rapture and of shame, her young blood sensitive to the least hint of apathy in her audience.

Jewdwine's apathy was immense.

"Another name for the fugitive actuality," he said. "Well, I'm afraid I haven't any more time--" He looked round the room a little vaguely, and as he did so he laid on the young man's shoulder a delicate fastidious hand. "There are one or two men here I should have liked to introduce you to, if I'd had time.--Another night, perhaps--" He piloted him downstairs and so out into the Strand.

"Good night. Good night. Take my advice and leave the fugitive actuality alone."

Those were Jewdwine's last words, spoken from the depths of the hansom. It carried him to the classic heights of Hampstead, to the haunts of the cultivated, the intellectual, the refined.

Rickman remained a moment. His dreamy gaze was fixed on the massive pile before him, that rose, solidly soaring, flaunting a brutal challenge to the tender April sky. It stood for the vast material reality, the whole of that eternal, implacable Power which is at enmity with dreams; which may be conquered, propitiated, absorbed, but never annihilated or denied.

That actuality was not fugitive.

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Chapter VII

Perhaps it was not to be wondered at if Mr. Rickman had not yet found himself. There were, as he sorrowfully reflected, so many Mr. Rickmans.

There was Mr. Rickman of the front shop and second-hand department, known as "our Mr. Rickman." The shop was proud of him; his appearance was supposed to give it a certain cachet. He neither strutted nor grovelled; he moved about from shelf to shelf in an absent-minded scholarly manner. He served you, not with obsequiousness, nor yet with condescension, but with a certain remoteness and abstraction, a noble apathy. Though a bookseller, his literary conscience remained incorruptible. He would introduce you to his favourite authors with a magnificent take-it-or-leave-it air, while an almost imperceptible lifting of his eyebrows as he handed you your favourite was a subtle criticism of your taste. This method of conducting business was called keeping up the tone of the establishment. The appearance and disappearance of this person was timed and regulated by circumstances beyond his own control, so that of necessity all the other Mr. Rickmans were subject to him.

For there was Mr. Rickman the student and recluse, who inhabited the insides of other men's books. Owing to his habitual converse with intellects greater--really greater--than his own, he was an exceedingly humble and reverent person. A high and stainless soul. You would never have suspected his connection with Mr. Rickman, the Junior Journalist, the obscure writer of brilliant paragraphs, a fellow destitute of reverence and decency and everything except consummate impudence, a disconcerting humour and a startling style. But he was still more distantly related to Mr. Rickman the young man about town. And that made four. Besides these four there was a fifth, the serene and perfect intelligence, who from some height immeasurably far above them sat in judgement on them all. But for his abnormal sense of humour he would have been a Mr. Rickman of the pure reason, no good at all. As it was, he occasionally offered some reflection which was enjoyed but seldom acted upon.

And underneath these Mr. Rickmans, though inextricably, damnably one with them, was a certain apparently commonplace but amiable young man, who lived in a Bloomsbury boarding-house and dropped his aitches. This young man was tender and chivalrous, full of little innocent civilities to the ladies of his boarding-house; he admired, above all things, modesty in a woman, and somewhere, in the dark and unexplored corners of his nature, he concealed a prejudice in favour of marriage and the sanctities of home.

That made six, and no doubt they would have pulled together well enough; but the bother was that any one of them was liable at any moment to the visitation of the seventh--Mr. Rickman the genius. There was no telling whether he would come in the form of a high god or a demon, a consolation or a torment. Sometimes he would descend upon Mr. Rickman in the second-hand department, and attempt to seduce him from his allegiance to the Quarterly Catalogue. Or he would take up the poor journalist's copy as it lay on a table, and change it so that its own editor wouldn't know it again. And sometimes he would swoop down on the little bookseller as he sat at breakfast on a Sunday morning, in his nice frock coat and clean collar, and wrap his big flapping wings round him, and carry him off to the place where the divine ideas come from leaving a silent and to all appearances idiotic young gentleman in his place. Or he would sit down by that young gentleman's side and shake him out of his little innocences and complacencies, and turn all his little jokes into his own incomprehensible humour. And then the boarding-house would look uncomfortable and say to itself that Mr. Rickman had been drinking.

In short, it was a very confusing state of affairs, and one that made it almost impossible for Mr. Rickman to establish his identity. Seven Rickmans--only think of it! And some reckon an eighth, Mr. Rickman drunk. But this is not altogether fair; for intoxication acted rather on all seven at once, producing in them a gentle fusion with each other and the universe. They had ceased to struggle. But Mr. Rickman was not often drunk, or at least not nearly so often as his friends supposed.

So it was all very well for Jewdwine, who was not so bewilderingly constructed, to talk about finding your formula and pulling yourself together. How, Mr. Rickman argued, could you hope to find the formula of a fellow who could only be expressed in fractions, and vulgar fractions, too? How on earth could you pull yourself together when Nature had deliberately cut you into little pieces? Never since poor Orpheus was torn to tatters by the Mænads was there a poet so horribly subdivided. Talk of being dissolute, dissipated! Those adjectives were a poor description of S.K.R. It was more than sowing a mere handful of wild oats, it was a disintegration, a scattering of Rickmans to all the winds of the world.

Find himself, indeed!

Still, he was perfectly willing to try; and to that end (after dining with people who were anything but cultivated, or intellectual, or refined) he turned himself loose into the streets.

The streets--he was never tired of them. After nine or ten hours of sitting in a dusty second-hand bookshop, his soul was dry with thirst for the living world, and the young joy of the world, "the fugitive actuality." And her ways were in the streets.

Being a young poet about town, he turned to the streets as naturally as a young poet in the country turns to the woods and fields. For in the streets, if you know how to listen, you can hear the lyric soul of things as plainly, more plainly perhaps, than in the woods or fields. Only it sings another sort of song. And going into the streets was Rickman's way (the only way open to him as yet) of going into society. The doors were thrown hospitably wide to him; one day was as good as another; the world was always at home.

It was a world where he could pick and choose his acquaintance; where, indeed, out of that multitudinous, never-ending procession of persons, his power of selection was unlimited. He never had any difficulty with them; their methods were so charmingly simple and direct. In the streets the soul is surprised through the lifting of an eyelid, and the secret of the heart sits lightly on the curl of the lip. These passers by never wearied him; they flung him the flower of the mystery and--passed by. The perfection of social intercourse he conceived as a similar succession of radiant intimacies.

To-night he went southwards down Gower Street, drawn by the never-ending fugitive perspective of the lamps. He went westwards down Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly. The Circus was a gleaming basin filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with lights. Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in their flight. Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings leading into the night. The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden white façade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of the dark above them. Over all was an illusion of immensity.

Nine o'clock of an April night--the time when a great city has most power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his imagination and his soul.

He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night. He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers' eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing. A very ordinary spectacle. But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic, processional resonance and grandeur. It was an unrhymed song out of Saturnalia, it was the luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets.

Half-past nine; a young girl met him and stopped. She laughed into his face.

"Pretty well pleased with yourself, aren't you?" said the young girl.

He laughed back again. He was pleased with the world, so of course he was pleased with himself. They were one. The same spirit was in Mr. Rickman that was in the young girl and in the young April night.

They walked together as far as the Strand, conversing innocently.

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Chapter VIII

At ten o'clock he found himself in a corridor of the Jubilee Variety Theatre. The young girl had vanished.

For a moment he stood debating whether he would go home and work out some ideas he had. Or whether he would pursue the young Joy, the fugitive actuality, to the very threshold of the dawn. Whether, in short, he would make a night of it.

He was aroused by the sound of a box-door opening and shutting; and a shining shirt-front and a shining face darted suddenly into the light. At the same moment a voice hailed him.

"Hello, Razors! That you?"

Voice, face, and shining shirt-front belonged to Mr. Richard Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue.

"Razors" was the name by which Rickman was known to his intimates in subtle allusion to his youth. He responded sulkily to the hail. Dicky Pilkington was the last person he desired to meet. For he owed Dicky a certain sum, not large, but larger than he could conveniently pay, and Dicky was objectionable for other reasons. He had mysterious relations with the Management of the Jubilee Theatre, and consequently unlimited facilities of access to Miss Poppy Grace. Besides, there was something about him that was deadly to ideas.

Ideas or no ideas, Mr. Pilkington was not to be evaded. He bore down on Rickman, shining genially, and addressed him with an air of banter.

"Couldn't have arranged it better. You're the very fellow I want."

There was a suggestion of a chuckle in his voice which sent Rickman's thoughts flying fearfully to his last I.O.U. The alert mind of Pilkington followed their flight. He was intensely amused. He always was amused when anybody showed a marked distaste for his society.

"Your business, not mine, this time, Rick. I happen to know of a ripping old library for sale down in Devonshire. Shouldn't have thought of it if I hadn't seen you."

"Well?" Rickman's face expressed an utter inability to perceive the connection. Once the iron shutters had closed on Rickman's he felt that he was no more a part of it. Words could not express his abhorrence of the indecent people who insisted on talking shop out of shop hours. And Dicky never had any decency.

"Well--it's practically on our hands, d'ye see? And if your people care to take over the whole lot, I can let you have it pretty reasonably."

Rickman's face emptied itself of all expression whatever.

"I say, you are a cool young cuss. Is this the way you generally do business?"

"I'll think it over."

"Wouldn't think too long if I were you. It ought to go by auction, and it might; only private contract's preferred."

"Why preferred?"

"Out of respect for the feelin's of the family."

Rickman's eyes were wandering dreamily from the matter in hand. They had alighted on an enormous photograph of Miss Poppy Grace. For an instant thought, like a cloud, obscured the brilliance of Mr. Pilkington's face.

"Anyhow I've given you the straight tip," said Pilkington.

"Thanks. We'll send a fellow down to overhaul the thing."

"He'd better hurry up then. It may have to go by auction after all. But if you'd like the refusal of it, now's your chance."

But Rickman betrayed no enthusiasm.

"You'd better see the guv'nor about it."

Mr. Pilkington looked Rickman up and down, and encountered an immovable determination in his gaze.

"Right you are. I'll send him word to-night. Ta-ta!" He turned again in the moment of departing. "I say, he must send a good man down, you know. It'll take an expert. There's a lot of old things--Greek and Latin--that's something in your line, isn't it?"

But Rickman's line at present was the line of least resistance. It was ten past ten, and Poppy Grace was "on" from ten fifteen to ten forty.

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Chapter IX

She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her little programme pretty well by heart. But her fascinations were independent of the glamour of the foot-lights. It was off the stage that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great goddess Diana is not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life. Poppy's rooms were next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that did it.

Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding wooden partition as a partition, and sit very far back behind it, you will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see nothing, neither will you be seen. If, however, you prefer, as Mr. Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe things passing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite, or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots, without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether she objected to his smoking (she did not). Then it came to acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy's coming out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman's looking to see if Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her home from the Jubilee Theatre. The stars were out; not that Poppy cared a rap about the stars.

Her first appearance to-night was in the character of a coster-girl, a part well suited to her audacity and impertinent prettiness. Poppy was the tiniest dancer that ever whirled across a stage, a circumstance that somewhat diminished the vulgarity of her impersonation, while it gave it a very engaging character of its own. Her small Cockney face, with its impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small), its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from the perpendicular.

The secret of Poppy's popularity lay in this, that you could always depend on her; she always played the same part in the same manner; but her manner was her own. To come on the stage quietly; to look, in spite of her coster costume, the picture of suburban innocence, and pink and white propriety; to stand facing her audience for a second of time, motionless and in perfect gravity--it was a trick that, though Poppy never varied it, had a more killing effect than the most ingenious impromptu.

"Sh--sh--sh--sh!" A flutter of programmes in the pit was indignantly suppressed by the gallery. There was a movement of Poppy's right eyelid which in a larger woman would have been called a wink; in Poppy it appeared as an exaggerated twinkle. It was greeted with a roar of rapturous applause. Then Poppy, with her hands on her hips, and her head on one side, raised her Cockney voice in a high-pitched song, executing between each verse a slow, swinging chassée to the stage Humorist with the concertina.

"Oh, she's my fancy girl, With 'er 'air all outer curl, 'Ooks orf, eyes orf, petticoats all awry. For then she isn't shy; She gives 'er bangs a twirl, And it's--'Kiss me quick!'--and--'That's the Trick!' --and--(dim)--'Wouldn't yer like to try?'"

When the stage Humorist with the concertina stopped chasséeing, and put his finger to his nose, and observed, "That's wot you might call a dim innuender," Rickman could have kicked him.

(cresc.), 'But got up fit ter kill, In 'er velverteen an' frill, It's--'Ands orf!'--'Heyes orf!'--'Fetch yer one in the heye!'-- A strollin' down the 'Igh, With 'Enery, Alf an' Bill, It's--'None er that!'--and 'Mind my 'at!'--and (fortissimo)--'WOULDN'T yer like to try!'"

"To try! To try!" Her chassée quickened ever so little, doubled on itself, and became a tortuous thing. Poppy's feet beat out the measure that is danced on East End pavements to the music of the concertina. In the very abandonment of burlesque Poppy remained an artist, and her dance preserved the gravity of the original ballet, designed for performance on a flagstone. Now it unfolded; it burst its bounds; it was a rhythmic stampede. Louder and louder, her clicking heels beat the furious time; higher and higher her dexterous toes flew to her feathers that bowed to meet them, and when her last superhuman kick sent her hat flying, and the Humorist caught it on his head, they had brought the house down.

Rickman went out to the bar, where he found Dicky Pilkington, and at Dicky's suggestion he endeavoured to quench with brandy and soda his inextinguishable thirst.

He returned to the storm and glare of the ballet, the last appearance of that small, incarnate genius of Folly. There were other dancers, but he saw none but her. He knew every pose and movement of her body, from her first tentative, preluding pirouette, to her last moon-struck dance, when she tossed her tall grenadier's cap to the back of the stage, and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury of the foot-lights.

There was a noise of many boots beating the floor of the house; it grew into a thick, solid body of sound, torn at intervals by a screaming whistle from the galleries. Someone up there shouted her name--"Poppy--Poppy Grace!" and Rickman shivered.

To Rickman's mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it suggested--absurdly and abominably--a certain cheap drink of sudden and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined, extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably wandering about in a world too gross for it; and now as the Young Joy, the fugitive actuality. To-night, after brandy and soda, his imagination possessed itself of Poppy, and wove round her the glory and gloom of the world. It saw in her, not the incarnation of the rosy moment, but the eternal sacrifice of woman, the tragedy of her abasement, her obedience to the world. Which, when he came to think of it, was really very clever of his imagination.

Meanwhile Poppy was behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light of her flickering flamewise. There was a stir, a wave, as if the heart of the house had heaved. Pit and gallery breathed hard. Rickman leaned forward with clouded eyes and troubled forehead, while the young shop-men--the other young shop-men--thrilled with familiar and delicious emotion. Now she curtsied, as she had curtsied for the last fifty nights, bowing lower and lower till her hair fell over her face and swept the stage; and now she shook her head till the great golden whorl of hair seemed the only part of her left spinning; then Poppy folded her arms and sank, sank till she sat on her heels, herself invisible, curtained in modest and mystic fashion by her hair.

"Bravo! Bravo!" "That's the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, she's my fancy girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"

It was all over.

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Chapter X

He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of Propriety. Now it was Poppy's drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself. Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas. Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing perspective. But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as "Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said she.

Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over Ricky-ticky's head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr. Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on the table. She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice. After all, it came to the same thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his innocence.

The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain, Poppy's canary woke out of his first sleep. He untucked his head from under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.

"Oh, dicky," said Poppy, "it's time you were in your little bed!"

He did not take the hint. He was intent on certain movements of Poppy's fingers and the tip of her tongue concerned in the making of cigarettes.

He was gazing into her face as if it held for him the secret of the world. And that look embarrassed her. It had all the assurance of age and all the wonder of youth in it. Poppy's eyes were trained to look out for danger signals in the eyes of boys, for Poppy, according to those lights of hers, was honest. If she knew the secret of the world, she would not have told it to Ricky-ticky; he was much too young. Men, in Poppy's code of morality, were different. But this amazing, dreamy, interrogative look was not the sort of thing that Poppy was accustomed to, and for once in her life Poppy felt shy.

"I say, Rickets, there goes a quarter to twelve. Did I wake him out of his little sleep?"

Poppy talked as much to the canary as to Rickets, which made it all quite proper. As for Rickman, he talked hardly at all.

"You'll have to go in ten minutes, Rick." And by way of softening this announcement she gave him some champagne.

He had paid no attention to that hint either, being occupied with a curious phenomenon. Though Poppy was, for her, most unusually stationary, he found that it was making him slightly giddy to look at her.

He was arriving at that moment of intoxication when things lose their baldness and immobility, and the world begins to float like an enchanted island in a beautiful blood-warm haze. Nothing could be more agreeable than the first approaches of this blessed state; he encouraged it, anticipating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was; but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine. He moved in a region of gross but glorious exaggeration, where his wretched little Cockney passion assumed the proportions of a superb romance. His soul that minute was the home of the purest, most exalted emotions. Yes, he could certainly feel it coming on. Poppy's face was growing bigger and bigger, opening out and blossoming like an enormous flower.

"Nine minutes up. In another minute you go."

It seemed to him that Poppy was measuring time by pouring champagne into little tumblers, and that she gave him champagne to drink. He knew it was no use drinking it, for that thirst of his was unquenchable; but he drank, for the sake of the illusion; and as he drank it seemed to him that not only was Poppy worthy of all adoration, but that his passion for her was no mere vulgar and earthly passion; it was a glorious and immortal thing.

Poppy looked at him curiously. She was the soul of hospitality, but it struck her that she was being a little too liberal with the champagne.

"No, Razors. No more fizz. If I were to drink a drop more it would spoil my little dance that always fetches the boys."

She turned her tumbler upside down in token of renunciation and led the way into the front room. He followed her with enchanted feet. He was now moving as in an Arabian Night's dream.

In the front room was a sofa--No, a divan, and on the divan the skin of a Polar bear sprawling. Rickman and Poppy sat on the top of the bear. Such a disreputable, out-of-elbow, cosmopolitan bear! His little eye-holes were screwed up in a wicked wink, a wink that repudiated any connection with his native waters of the Pole.

The house was very still. Behind his yellow gauze curtain the canary stirred in his sleep. "Swe-eet," he murmured plaintively in his dream.

"Swe-eet, dicky!" echoed Poppy. Then because she had nothing to say she began to sing. She sang the song of Simpson the tenor, Simpson the master of tears.

"'Twas on the night our little byby died, And Bill, 'e comes, and, 'Sal,' 'e sez,'look ere, I've signed a pledge,'ser 'e, 'agains the beer. 'D'ye see?' Sez 'e. 'And wot I 'ope ter syve Will tittervyte 'is bloomin' little gryve.' Then--Well--yo' should 'ave 'eard us 'ow we cried-- Like bloomin' kids--the--night--the byby--died.

"That song," said Poppy, "doesn't exactly suit my style of beauty. You should have heard Simpey sing it. That 'd 'ave given you something to 'owl for."

For Rickman looked depressed.

The sound of Poppy's song waked the canary; he fluttered down from his perch and stretched his wings, trailing them on the floor of his cage to brush the sleep out of them.

"Did you ever see such affectation," said Poppy, "look at him, striking attitudes up there, all by 'is little self!"

Poppy seemed to cling to the idea of the canary as a symbol of propriety.

"Do you know, Rickets, it's past twelve o'clock?"

No, he didn't know. He had taken no count of time. But he knew that he had drunk a great many little tumblers of champagne, and that his love for Poppy seemed more than ever a supersensuous and immortal thing. He pulled himself together in order to tell her so; but at that moment he was confronted by an insuperable difficulty. In the tender and passionate speech that he was about to make to her, it would be necessary to address her by name. But how--in Heaven's name--could he address a divinity as Poppy? He settled the difficulty by deciding that he would not address her at all. There should be no invocation. He would simply explain.

He got up and walked about the room and explained in such words as pleased him the distinction between the corruptible and the incorruptible Eros. From time to time he chanted his own poems in the intervals of explaining; for they bore upon the matter in hand.

"Rickets," said Poppy, severely, "you've had too much fizz. I can see it in your eyes--most unmistakably. I know it isn't very nice of me to say so, when it's my fizz you've been drinking; but it isn't really mine, it's Dicky Pilkington's--at least he paid for it."

But Rickets did not hear her. His soul, soaring on wings of champagne, was borne far away from Dicky Pilkington.

"Know" (chanted Rickets) "that the Love which is my Lord most high, He changeth not with seasons and with days, His feet are shod with light in all his ways. And when he followeth none have power to fly.

"He chooseth whom he will, and draweth nigh. To them alone whom he himself doth raise Unto his perfect service and his praise; Of such Love's lowliest minister am I."

"If you'd asked me," said Poppy, "I should have said he had a pretty good opinion of himself. What do you say, Dicky?"

"Sweet!" sang the canary in one pure, penetrating note, the voice of Innocence itself.

"Isn't he rakish?" But Poppy got no answer from the sonneteer. He had wheeled round from her, carried away in the triumph and rapture of the sestette. His steps marked the beat of the iambics, he turned on his heel at the end of every line. For the moment he was sober, as men count sobriety.

"For he I serve hath paced Heaven's golden floor, And chanted with the Seraphims' glad choir; Lo! All his wings are plumed with fervent fire; He hath twain that bear him upward evermore, With twain he veils his holy eyes before The mystery of his own divine desire.

"Does it remind you of anything?" he asked. It struck her as odd that he seemed to realize her presence with difficulty.

"No, I can't say that I ever heard anything like it in my life."

"Well, the idea's bagged from Dante--I mean Dante-gabrier-rossetti. But he doesn't want it as badly as I do. In fac', I don' think he wants it at all where he is now. If he does, he can take any of mine in exchange. You bear me out, Poppy--I invite the gentleman to step down and make 's own s'lection: Nobody can say I plagiarize anyborry--anyborry but myself."

"All right, don't you worry, old chappy," said Poppy soothingly. "You come here and sit quiet."

He came and sat down beside her, as if the evening had only just begun. He sat down carefully, tenderly, lest he should crush so much as the hem of her fan-like, diaphanous skirts. And then he began to talk to her.

He said there was no woman--no lady--in the world for whom he felt such reverence and admiration; "Pop-oppy," he said, "you're fit to dance before God on the floor of Heaven when they've swept it."

"Oh come," said Poppy, "can't you go one better?"

He could. He did. He intimated that though he worshipped every hair of Poppy's little head and every inch of Poppy's little body, what held him, at the moment, were the fascinations of her mind, and the positively gorgeous beauty of her soul. Yes; there could be no doubt that the object of his devotion was Poppy's imperishable soul.

"Well," said Poppy, "that tykes the very tip-top macaroon!"

Then she laughed; she laughed as if she would never have done. She laughed, first with her eyes, then with her throat, then with her whole body, shaking her head and rocking herself backwards and forwards. She laughed till her hair came down, and he took it and smoothed it into two sleek straight bands, and tied them in a loose knot under her chin.

Then she stopped laughing. Her face between the two tight sheaths of hair seemed to close and shrink to a thin sharp bud. It closed and opened again, it grew nearer and bigger, it bent forward and put out its mouth (for it had a mouth, this extraordinary flower) and kissed him.

"I sy, it's nearly one o'clock," said she. "You've got to clear out of this. Come!"

She rose; she stood before him holding out her hands to help him to get up and go. She laughed again. She laughed wide-mouthed, her head flung back, her face foreshortened, her white throat swelled and quivering--the abandoned figure of Low Comedy incarnate. But that was not what he saw.

To him it was as if the dark, impenetrable world had suddenly unfolded, had blossomed and flowered in the rose of her mouth; as if all the roses of all the world went to make up the petals of that rose. Her body was nothing but a shining, transparent vessel for the fire of life. It ran over; it leapt from her; the hands she stretched out to him were two shallow lamps that could hardly hold the tall, upward shooting, wind-tortured splendour of the flame.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. The movement, being somewhat complicated, brought him within a yard of his own figure as presented in one of the long mirrors. He stood there, arrested, fascinated, shocked by that person in the mirror. The face he was accustomed to see in mirrors was grave, and not high coloured, and it always kept its mouth shut. This person's face was very red, and his mouth was slightly open, a detail he noticed with a peculiar disgust. He could not get away from it, either. It was held there, illuminated, insisted on, repeated for ever and ever, smaller and smaller, an endless procession of faces, all animated by one frenzy and one flame. He was appalled by this mysterious multiplication of his person, and by the flushed and brilliant infamy of his face. The face was the worst; he thought he had never seen anything so detestable as the face. He sat down and hid it in his hands.

"Poor Rickets," said Poppy softly. She drew his hands from his face by a finger at a time.

"Oh, Ricky-ticky, you are such a rum little fellow. I suppose that's why I like you. But for the life of me I can't think why I kissed you; unless it was to say Good-night."

A kiss more or less was nothing to Poppy. And that one, she felt, had been valedictory. She had kissed, not Ricky-ticky, but his dying Innocence, the boy in him. And she had really wanted him to go.

The house was stiller than ever. The canary had tucked his head under his wing and gone to sleep again. Out of the silence the clock of St. Pancras Church struck one.

And yet he had not gone.

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Chapter XI

A step was heard on the pavement outside; then the click of a latch-key; a step on the stairs, at the threshold, and Mr. Pilkington walked in with the air of being the master of the house and everything in it.

The little laughing mask slipped from Poppy's face, her eyes were two sapphire crescents darting fright under down-dropped lids. There was a look in Dicky's face she did not care for. But Rickman--as Maddox had testified--was a perfect little gentleman when he was drunk, and at the sight of Pilkington, chivalry, immortal chivalry, leapt in his heart.

He became suddenly grave, steady and coherent.

"I was just going, Miss Grace. But--if you want me to stay a little longer, I'll stay."

"You'd better go," said Miss Grace.

Her eyes followed him sullenly as he went; so did Pilkington's.

"Well," she said, "I suppose that's what you wanted?"

"Yes, but there's no good overdoing the thing, you know. This," said Pilkington, "is a damned sight too expensive game for him to play."

"He's all right. It wasn't his fault. I let him drink too much champagne."

"What did you do that for? Couldn't you see he'd had enough already?"

"How was I to know? He's nicer when he's drunk than other people are when they're sober."

He looked at her critically. "I know all about him. What I'd like to know is what you see in him."

Poppy returned his look with interest. Coarseness in Dicky Pilkington's eyes sat brilliant and unashamed.

"Would you? So would I. P'raps it's wot I don't see in him."

Now subtlety was the last thing Dicky expected from Poppy, and it aroused suspicion.

Whatever Poppy's instructions were she had evidently exceeded them. Poppy read his thoughts with accuracy.

"I only did what you told me. If you don't like it, you can finish the job yourself. I'm tired," said Poppy, wearily coiling up her hair.

She was no longer in spirits.

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Chapter XII

A tiny jet of gas made a glimmer in the fan-light of Mrs. Downey's boarding-house next door. Mrs. Downey kept it burning there for Mr. Rickman.

Guided by this beacon, he reached his door, escaping many dangers. For the curbstone was a rocking precipice, and the street below it a grey and shimmering stream, that rolled, and flowed, and rolled, and never rested. The houses, too, were so drunk as to be dangerous. They bowed over him, swaying hideously from their foundations. They seemed to be attracted, just as he was, by that abominable slimy flow and glister of the asphalt. Another wriggle of the latch-key, and they would be over on the top of him.

He approached his bedroom candle with infinite precaution. He had tried to effect a noiseless entry, but every match, as it spurted and went out, was a little fiendish spit-fire tongue betraying him. From behind a bedroom door, ajar at the dark end of the passage, the voice of Mrs. Downey gently reminded him not to forget to turn the gas out.

There was a bright clear space in his brain which Pilkington's champagne had not penetrated, so intolerably clear and bright that it hurt him to look at it. In that space three figures reeled and whirled; three, yet one and the same; Poppy of the coster-dance, Poppy of the lunatic ballet, and Poppy of the Arabian night. Beyond the bright space and the figures there was a dark place that was somehow curtained off. Something had happened there, he could not see what. And in trying to see he forgot to turn the gas out. He turned it up instead.

He left it blazing away at the rate of a penny an hour, a witness against him in the face of morning. But he did not forget to sit down at the bottom of the stairs and take his boots off, lest he should wake Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who worked so hard, and had to be up so early. He left them on the stairs, where Flossie tripped over them in the morning.

On the first landing a young man in a frowsy sleeping suit stood waiting for him. A fresh, sober, and thoroughly wide-awake young man.

"Gurra bed, Spinks," said Mr. Rickman severely to the young man.

"All right, old man." Mr. Spinks lowered his voice to a discreet whisper. "I say--do you want me to help you find your legs?"

"Wish you'd fin' any par' of me that is n' legs," said Mr. Rickman. And he went on to explain and to demonstrate to Mr. Spinks the resemblance (amounting to identity) between himself and the Manx arms. "Three legs, rampant, on the bend, proper. Amazin', isn't it?"

"It is amazin'."

Feigning surprise and interest, Mr. Spinks relieved him of his candle; and under that escort Mr. Rickman managed to attain to the second floor.

Mr. Rickman's room was bared to the glimmer of a lamp in the street below. He plunged and stumbled through a litter of books. The glimmer fell on the books, on many books; books that covered three walls from floor to ceiling; books ranged above and beside the little camp-bed in the corner; books piled on the table and under it. The glimmer fell, too, on the mantel-piece, reflected from the glass above it, right on to the white statuette of the Venus of Milo that supported a photograph of a dancing Poppy--Poppy, who laughed in the face of the goddess with insatiable impudence, and flung to the immortal forehead the flick of her shameless foot. White and austere gleamed the Venus (if Venus she be, for some say she is a Wingless Victory, and Rickman, when sober, inclined to that opinion). White and austere gleamed the little camp-bed in the corner. He ignored Mr. Spinks' discreet suggestion. He wasn't going to undress to please Spinks or anybody. He'd see Spinks in another world first. He wasn't going to bed like a potman; he was going to sit up like a poet and write. That's what he was going to do. This was his study.

With shaking hands he lit the lamp on his study table; the wick sputtered, and the light in his head jigged horribly with the jigging of the flame. It was as if he was being stabbed with little knives of light.

He plunged his head into a basin of cold water, threw open his window and leaned out into the pure regenerating night. Spinks sat down on a chair and watched him, his fresh, handsome face clouded with anxiety. He adored Rickman sober; but for Rickman drunk he had a curious yearning affection. If anything, he preferred him in that state. It seemed to bring him nearer to him. Spinks had never been drunk in his life, but that was his feeling.

Rickman laid his arms upon the window sill and his head upon his arms.

"'The blessed damozel leaned out,'" he said (the idea in his mind being that he was a blessed damozel).

"'From the gold bar of heaven.'"

("Never knew they had 'em up there," murmured Spinks.)

"'Her eyes were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even'--Oh--my--God!"

A great sigh shook him, and went shuddering into the night like the passing of a lost soul. He got up and staggered to the table, and grasped it by the edge, nearly upsetting the lamp. The flare in his brain had died down as the lamp burnt steadily. Under its shade a round of light fell on his Euripides, open at the page he had been reading the night before.

[Greek: ELENÊ]

He saw it very black, with the edges a little wavering, a little blurred, as if it had been burnt by fire into the whiteness of the page. Below, the smaller type of a chorus reeled and shook through all its lines. Set up by an intoxicated compositor.

Under the Euripides was the piled up manuscript of Rickman's great neo-classic drama, Helen in Leuce. He implored Spinks to read it. (Spinks was a draper's assistant and uncultured.) He thrust the manuscript into his hands.

"There," he said, "rea' that. Tha's the sor' o' thing I write when I'm drunk. Couldn' do it now t' save my life. Temp'rance been my ruin."

He threw himself on his bed.

"It's all righ'. At nine o'clock to-morrow morning, no--at a quar'er pas' nine, I mean three quar'ers pas' nine, I shall be drunk. Not disgustingly and ridicklelously, as you are, Spinky, at this minute, but soo-p-p-perbubbly, loominously, divinely drunk! You don' know what I could do if I was only drunk."

"Oh, come, I shouldn't complain, if I was you. You'll do pretty well as you are, I think."

With an almost maternal tenderness and tact Mr. Spinks contrived to separate the poet from his poem. He then undressed him. That is to say, by alternate feats of strength, dexterity and cunning, he succeeded in disengaging him from the looser portion of his clothing. From his shirt and trousers Rickman refused to part, refused with a shake of the head, slow, gentle, and implacable, and with a smile of great sweetness and gravity and wisdom. He seemed to regard those garments with a peculiar emotion as the symbols of his dignity, and more especially, as the insignia of sobriety.

Spinks sat down and stared at the object of his devotion. "Poor old chappie," he murmured tenderly. He was helpless before that slow melancholy shaking of the head, that mysterious and steadfast smile. He approached tip-toe on deprecating feet. But Rickman would none of him; his whole attitude was eloquent of rebuke. He waved Spinks away with one pathetic hand; with the other he clutched and gathered round him the last remnants of his personal majesty. And thus, in his own time and in his own fashion, he wandered to his bed. Even then he conveyed reproach and reproof by his manner of entering it; he seemed to vanish subtly, to withdraw himself, as into some sacred and inviolable retreat.

Spinks crept away, saddened by the rebuff. After all, he was no nearer to Rickman drunk than to Rickman sober. Half an hour later, he was asleep in the adjoining room, dreaming a lightsome dream of ladies and mousselines de laine, when suddenly the dream turned to a nightmare. It seemed to him that there descended upon him a heavy rolling weight, as of a bale of woollens. He awoke and found that it was Rickman.

The poet lay face downwards across the body of his friend, and was crooning into his ear the great chorus from the third act of Helen in Leuce. He said that nobody but Spinky understood it. And Spinky couldn't understand it if he wasn't drunk.

Whereupon Spinks was most curiously uplifted and consoled.

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Chapter XIII

He woke tired out, as well he might be, after spending half the night in the pursuit of young Joy personified in Miss Poppy Grace, young Joy, who, like that little dancer, is the swiftest of all swift things.

Rickman carried into this adventure a sort of innocence that renewed itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the gaiety, the naïveté of the pursuit. She was always in front of him, that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the secret of the world. And long before the morning she would pick up her skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him, formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard before. He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent, accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure spirit inside him. And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet, because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too, somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he had to bear.

Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April fool of himself. He knew it by the pain in his head and other disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the shirt and trousers of the day.

And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet Mr. Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey's tender womanly concern, as he turned white over the bacon and the butter. He didn't know which were worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones. He had to be at the shop by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to its eight hours' work.

In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of "Rickman's". At nine o'clock in the morning it was more real to him than any real thing; it even assumed an abominable personality; it was an all-compelling, all-consuming power that sucked from him his time, his life, his energy, and for six days out of the seven required of him his soul. That at the same time it provided him with the means of bodily subsistence only added to the horror of the thing. It was as if "Rickman's", destroyer and preserver, renewed his life every quarter day that it might draw in, devour, annihilate it as before. There was a diabolical precision in the action of the machine that made and unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer pause--when for three days his soul would be given back to him. The only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed, the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up and eager for the day. By the time Keith had got down to breakfast Isaac had caught the early train that landed him in the City at nine. Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.

And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart swelled with thankfulness and pride. For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer, too, in his way. There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable merit and glory of Isaac's dreams was that they had all, or very nearly all, come true. They were of the sort that can be handed over the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank. His latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son. Keith, presumably, took after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the supreme effort of his birth. On her own birth there had been something in the nature of a slur. She had taken it to heart, and exhausted herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village sempstress and a village squire. Isaac, before he dreamed of greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty. She left to her boy her fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother's passion. Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a fleshless refinement of physique. Coarseness in grain, usually revealed by the lower half of a man's countenance, had with the elder Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region. Isaac's eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the spirit. Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat, smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion. His lips were hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a meditative hand. Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain genius to the man who had raised that mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art. Those stately premises, with their clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings, were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen. When Isaac grew great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature. For Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the successful tradesman he aspired to be. There were, in fact, two Rickman's: Rickman's in the City and Rickman's in the Strand. Rickman's in the Strand bore on its fore-front most unmistakeably the seal of the world; Rickman's in the City was sealed with the Lord's seal.

So that now there was not a single need of the great book-buying, book-loving Public that Rickman's did not provide for and represent. It pandered to (Isaac said "catered for") the highest and the lowest, the spirit as well as the flesh. Only Isaac was wise enough to keep the two branches of the business separate and distinct. His right hand professed complete ignorance of the doings of his left.

It may be that Isaac's heart was in his City shop. But there was something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was colossal. He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him. He aimed at nothing less than supremacy. He proposed to spread his nets till they had drawn in the greater part of the book trade of London; till Rickman's had reared its gigantic palaces in every district of the capital. In '92 there was some talk of depression in the book trade. Firms had failed. Isaac did not join in the talk, and he had his own theory of the failure. Men went smash for want of will, for want of brains, for want of courage and capital. Above all for want of capital. As if any man need want capital so long as he had the pluck to borrow, that is to say, to buy it. So ran his dream. And Isaac believed in his dream, and what was more, he had made Mr. Richard Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue, believe in it. "Rickman's," backed by Pilkington, would stand firm, firm as a rock.

Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater. It was not only by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman had raised himself from those obscure beginnings. Isaac was an artist in his own enormous way, and he had made an exhaustive study of the Public. With incredible versatility he followed every twist and turn of the great mind; the slow colossal movements which make capital, the fitful balancing, the sudden start and mad rush forward by which, if you can but foresee and keep pace with it, you reap the golden harvest of the hour. He never took his eye off the Public. He laid his finger, as it were, on that mighty pulse and recorded its fluctuations in his ledger.

But there was a region beyond those fluctuations. With new books there was always a pound's worth of risk to a pennyworth of profit; but there was no end of money to be got out of old ones, if only you knew how to set about it. And Isaac did not quite know how. In his front shop it was the Public, in his side shop it was the books that mattered, and knowledge of the one, however exhaustive, was no guide to the other. Isaac by himself cut a somewhat unfortunate figure; he stood fully equipped in the field where there was much danger and but little gain; he was helpless where the price of knowledge ruled immeasurably high. In the second-hand department audacity without education can do nothing. What he still wanted, then, was brains and yet more brains; not the raw material, mind you, he had plenty of that, but the finished product, the trained, cultured intellect. Isaac was a self-made man, a man ignorant of many things, religious, but uneducated.

But he had a son, and the son had a head on his shoulders a magnificent head that boy had. Mr. Horace Jewdwine had noticed it the first minute he came into the shop. And the magnificence of Keith's head had been pointed out to Isaac long before that, when Keith couldn't have been more than ten--why, nine he was; that was the beginning of it. Isaac could remember how Sir Joseph Harden of Lazarus, the great scholar, who was one of Isaac's best customers, poking round the little dingy shop in Paternoster Row (it was all second-hand in those days), came on the young monkey perched on the step-ladder, reading Homer. Sir Joseph had made him come down and translate for him then and there. And Keith went at it, translating for twenty minutes straight on end. Sir Joseph had said nothing, but he asked him what he was going to be, and the young Turk grinned up at him and said he was going to be a poet, "like 'Omer, that was what he was going to be." Isaac had said that was just like his impudence, but Sir Joseph stood there looking at him and smiling on the side of his face that Keith couldn't see, and he told the little chap to "work hard and mind his rough breathings." Isaac had supposed that was some sort of a joke, for Keith, he tried hard to grin, though his face went red hot all over. Then Sir Joseph had turned round very serious and asked if he, Rickman, had any other sons, because, whatever he did with the rest of them, he must make this one a scholar. Isaac had said No, he hadn't any but that one boy, and he would have to be brought up to the business. He was afraid he couldn't spare the time to make much of a scholar of him. Time, said Isaac, was money. What Sir Joseph said then Isaac had never forgotten. He had said; "True, time was money, loose cash in your pockets; but brains were capital." And there wasn't a better investment for them, he had added, than a good sound classical education. Isaac was to send the boy to the City of London, then to the London University, if he couldn't rise to Oxford; but Sir Joseph's advice was Oxford. Let him try for a scholarship. He added that he would like to do something for him later on if he lived. Isaac had never forgotten it; his memory being assisted by the circumstance that Sir Joseph had that very same day bought one hundred and twenty-five pounds' worth of books for his great library down in Devonshire.

The boy was sent to an "Academy," then to the City of London; Isaac had not risen to Oxford. Keith never tried for a scholarship, and if he had, Isaac would have drawn the line at a university education, as tending towards an unholy leisure and the wisdom of this world. Otherwise he had spared no expense, for he had grasped the fact that this was an investment, and he looked to have his money back again with something like fifty per cent. interest. And the boy, the boy was to come back, too, with a brain as bright as steel, all its queer little complicated parts in working order; in short, a superb machine; and Isaac would only have to touch a spring to set it going.

But the question was, what spring? And that, unfortunately, was what old Rickman never could lay his finger on.

Still it went, that machine of his, apparently of its own accord. It went mysteriously, capriciously, but fairly satisfactorily on the whole. And Isaac was wise; his very respect for the thing that had cost him so much prevented him from tampering with it.

It was in accordance with this policy of caution that they lived apart. Isaac loved the suburbs; Keith loved the town, and it was as well for one of them to live in it, near to their place of business. Isaac had married again, and though he was proud of his boy and fond of him, he contrived to be completely happy without him. He loved his little detached villa residence at Ilford in Essex, with its little flower-garden showing from the high road, its little stable for the pony and little paddock for the cow. He loved his large smooth-faced second wife, with her large balance at the bank and still larger credit in the Wesleyan circle they lived and moved in. He loved that Wesleyan circle, the comfortable, safe community that knew only the best, the Sunday best, of him. And Keith loved none of these things. By the education he had got and which he, Isaac, had given him, by the "religion" he hadn't got, and which nothing would induce him to take, by the obscure barriers of individuality and temperament, the son was separated from the father. As for meeting each other half-way, Isaac had tried it once or twice of a Sunday, when Keith had met him indeed, but with a directness that shocked Isaac and distressed him. He was made positively uncomfortable by his son's money-bought superiority; though the boy didn't bring it out and show it, Isaac felt all the time that it was there. He was very much happier without the boy. Keith among other things suggested vividly the thoughts which the Wesleyan desired to put away from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, thoughts of the present evil world, for which, on Sundays, he more than half suspected that he might be imperilling his immortal soul.

Sometimes in the watches of the night, especially of a Sunday night, it occurred to him that (owing to the domestic arrangement which kept the boy in a place which, when all was said and done, was a place of temptation) Keith's soul, no less immortal, might be in jeopardy too. He thought of him, an innocent lad, thrown on the mercy of London, as it were. But Isaac had faith in the mercy of the Lord. Besides, he wasn't the sort, a quiet, studious young fellow like Keith wasn't. And when Isaac's conscience began to feel a little uncertain upon that point, he simply laid the case circumstantially before the Lord, who knew all his difficulties and all his sins, and was infinitely able and eternally willing to bear them for him. By casting Keith upon the Lord an immense burden of responsibility was slipped from his conscience; and by the time Monday morning came round Isaac was again convinced that he had made the very best arrangements.

For not only was the state of Keith's soul a reproach to Isaac's conscience, but the brilliance of Keith's intellect was a terror to it. Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable discrepancies between his inner and his outer life. He wanted his son and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith's lucid sincerity at times appalled him. He had not yet discovered that his protection was in the very thing he feared. Keith was so recklessly single-minded that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.

But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop. He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell. It was books found in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender recollection of Paternoster Row. It was to Rickman's that he owed his education. Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically, abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do. At times he even appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate. Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him. He simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn't going to throw him over at the start.

But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so. As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman's and beyond it, shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead back there. He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of him to be made into a machine.

Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of this machine were hidden from Isaac. He hadn't even found out that the secret spring was not in the brain but the heart of it. He would look up a little uneasily as Keith pushed through the big swinging doors and took his seat at the table on the platform, and while he wondered what Keith was thinking of him, ten to one Keith wasn't thinking of him at all.

This morning, however, he was thinking of him, as it happened. And when the old man saw him up there, holding his poor bursting head in his hands, and said: "'Ead achin' my boy, again? That comes of studyin' too 'ard!" he thought with a touch of compunction, "What would he say if he knew I'd gone drunk to bed last night? And if he knew about Poppy?"

Isaac approached his son gingerly and with a certain fear. The only thing he had discovered about this admirable machine of his was that it went better when you left it alone. It had not been going quite so well lately though, and this morning it seemed decidedly out of order. He took a seat at the table and busied himself with a catalogue. Presently he rose and touched the boy gently on the shoulder.

"Come into the office a minute, will you?" he said, with a glance at the cashier. And Keith, wondering what on earth he wanted with him, followed into a recess shut on from the shop by a plate-glass and mahogany screen. Isaac hunted among the papers on his writing-table for a letter he could not find.

"You remember your old friend, Sir Joseph Harden, don't you?"

"Yes." Keith was in fact devoted to Sir Joseph's memory. He had often wondered what it was, that mysterious "something" which Sir Joseph would have done for him, if he had lived, and whether, if he had done it, it would have made a difference.

"Well, I got a letter from his place in Devonshire this morning. They've asked me to send them some one down to catalogue his library. They want an expert, and he must go at once and finish by the twenty-seventh, or it's no use. Dear me, where is that letter?"

Keith goaded his brain to an agonizing activity. It seemed to him that some such proposal had been made to him before. But where or when he couldn't for the life of him remember.

"Pilkington says he told you something about it, last night. I've heard from him this morning, too."

Pilkington--he remembered now. Dicky had bothered him about a library last night; and he had wished Dicky at the devil. He beat his brains till he struck from them an illuminating flash (Lord, how it hurt too!).

"He didn't say it was the Harden Library."

"It is, though." Isaac's coarse forehead flushed with triumph. "He's promised me the refusal of it when it comes into the market."

At any other time Keith would have been interested; but his head ached too much now. Still he was not too far gone to recognize the magnitude of the affair.

"You'll have to go down and look at it," continued Isaac persuasively, "and here's the opportunity. You go on their business, and do mine at the same time, and get well paid for it, too."

"I don't quite like going that way. If the thing's got to be sold why do they want it catalogued?"

"That's their business, not mine."

"It looks like 'their' mistake, whoever they are. Where's the letter?"

"I've mislaid it. That's not my business either. My business is to send you off before they find out their mistake. You can catch the eleven express from Waterloo if you look sharp."

Sharp? Never had he looked less so. Still, with his aching head he dimly perceived that his Easter was being tampered with.

"And supposing they want me to stay?"

"Stay then. The longer the better."

"I'll go after Easter then. I can't go before. I can't possibly. It's--it's out of the question."

His brain was clear enough on that point. He had suffered many things from the brutality of Rickman's; but hitherto its dealings had always been plain and above-board. It had kept him many an evening working overtime, it had even exacted an occasional Saturday afternoon; but it had never before swindled him out of a Bank holiday. The thing was incredible; it could not be. Rickman's had no rights over his Easter; whatever happened, that holy festival was indubitably, incontestably his.

"Don't be afraid. You'll get your holiday, my boy, when you come back. I'll make it worth your while."

"It isn't money--damn my head! It's so confoundedly inconvenient. You see, I'd made no end of engagements."

"It's a foolish thing to make engagements so long beforehand. We never know the day or the hour--"

"I knew both."

"Well, in any case you couldn't be going to any place of amusement on the Sunday."

Isaac and his conscience had agreed together to assume that young Keith walked habitually and of his own fancy in the right way.

"Come," he continued, "you're not going to fling up a chance like this without rhyme or reason."

"I don't know," said Keith, with a queer little one-sided smile, "I'd fling up a good many chances for a really good rhyme."

As for reason, there were at least two reasons why the present chance should not lightly be let go. One was the Harden Library. If the Harden Library was not great, it was almost historic, it contained the Aldine Plato of 1513, the Neapolitan Horace of 1474, and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde. The other reason was Dicky Pilkington, the Vandal into whose hands destiny had delivered it. Upon the Harden Library Pilkington was about to descend like Alaric on the treasures of Rome. Rickman's was hand in glove with Pilkington, and since the young barbarian actually offered them the chance of buying it outright for an old song, no time was to be lost. It would not do to trust too long to Dicky's ignorance. At any moment knowledge might enter into him and corrupt his soul.

No; clearly, he would have to go; he didn't see how he was to get out of it.

Isaac became uneasy, for the spirit of imprecation sat visibly on his son's brow. "When I said I'd make it worth your while I meant it."

"I know. It isn't that--"

"Wot is it? Wot is it then? Wot's the matter with you? Wot tomfoolery are you up to? Is it--" (Isaac's gross forehead flushed, his speech came thick through his stern lips.) "Is it a woman?"

He had also been young; though he had denied his youth.

The boy's white face quivered with a little wave of heat and pain. He clasped his forehead with his hands.

"Let me think."

His fingers tightened their hold, as if to grasp thought by holding the dizzy aching head that contained it. He could think of nothing but Poppy. He had seen his father's point quite steadily and clearly a minute ago; but when he thought of Poppy his brain began to turn round and round again. He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.

His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of concentrating itself on the matter in hand. "It takes a poet," he said to himself, "to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior Journalist." Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated? Or was it a cruel young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy? Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility. He saw through it. He saw through most things, Himself included. He knew perfectly well that he had developed this sudden turn for speculative thought because he was baulked of an appointment with a little variety actress. That he should see through the little variety actress was not to be expected. Poppy was in her nature impenetrable, woman being the ultimate fact, the inexorable necessity of thought. Supposing the universe to be nothing more than a dance of fortuitous atoms, then Poppy, herself a fortuitous atom, led the dance; she was the whirligig centre towards which all things whirled. No wonder that it made him giddy to think of her.

Suddenly out of its giddiness his brain conceived and instantly matured a plan. A practical plan. He would catch that eleven-thirty express all right. He would go down into Devonshire, and stay in Devonshire till Saturday. If necessary, he would sit up with those abominable books all Thursday night and Friday night. And on Saturday he would return. At the worst he would only have to go down again on Monday. He would have missed the Junior Journalists' dinner, he would be lucky if he saw the ghost of an idea on this side Whit Sunday, but he would have torn the heart out of his holiday.

He rose abruptly. "All right. It's a most awful nuisance, as it happens, but I'll go."

"I'm glad you're willing to oblige me. You'll not regret it."

Isaac was really meditating something very handsome in the way of a commission. As he looked benignly into his son's face and saw its deep misery and repugnance, he answered his own question.

"It is a woman."

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Chapter XIV

He wondered how much longer they were going to keep him waiting. His head still ached, and every nerve was irritable. He began to suspect the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of ringing for him and announcing himself a second time. Then he remembered that he was only the man who had come about the books; he was there on the Hardens' business, and their time was his time. And there were worse places to wait in than the library of Court House.

He found himself in a long low room that seemed to him immense. It was lighted by four deep-set windows, one to the south, one (a smaller side lattice) to the east, two to the west, and still the corners were left in gloom. The bookcases that covered the length and height of the walls were of one blackness with the oak floor and ceiling. The scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every patch of vellum; it streamed out of the great golden white busts on their pedestals in the windows, it lay in pale gleams over the eastern walls till it perished in the marble blackness of the roof and floor, sucked in as by an upper and nether abyss. This blackness intensified the glory of the April world outside whose luminous greens and blues were held like blazonry in the leaded lozenge panes. The two western windows thrown open looked over the valley to the hills; Castle Hill with its black battlement of pines, and round-topped Core; to Harmouth Gap, the great doorway of the west wind, and the straight brown flank of Muttersmoor, stretching to the sea. He seated himself by one of these open lattices, looked at the view, one of the loveliest in south Devon, and thought of Miss Poppy Grace. The vision of her that had still attended him on his journey down faded as if rebuked by the great tranquil presence of the hills. He was left supremely, magically alone.

Now it may have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness, a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave a deep sigh and turned his back on it abruptly.

He picked up a book that lay on the window seat; it was the History of Harmouth, and the history of Harmouth was the history of the Hardens of Court House. Court House was older than Harmouth and the Hardens were older than Court House. In early Tudor times, the chronicler informed him, the house was the court of justice for east Devon. Under Elizabeth it and the land for miles around it passed to the Hardens as a reward for their services to the Crown. The first thing they did was to pull down the gibbet on the north side and build their kitchen offices there. Next they threw out a short gable-ended wing to the east, and another to the west, enclosing a pleasant courtyard on the south. The west wing was now thrown into one with the long room that held the Harden Library.

Rickman searched carefully for information under this head. He learnt that the Harden library was the work of ten generations of scholars beginning with Sir Thomas, a Jacobean maker of madrigals, and ending with Sir Joseph, the Victorian Master of Lazarus; that the founder's date is carved on the oak chimney-piece at the north end, with the Harden motto:

16 INVICTUS 20;

that the late Master of Lazarus bought books by the cartload, and was obliged to break through the south wall and sacrifice the west wing (his wife's boudoir) to make room for them. But where he looked for some record of these treasures he found nothing but an elaborate description of the Harden arms with all their quarterings. The historian was not useful for Rickman's purposes. He was preoccupied with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of observing that their motto was Invictus. He certainly seemed to have found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious contortions and prostrations of his spirit. The poor wretch, in the pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently exhausted itself. "The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden," said the chronicler, "has made no addition to the library of his ancestors." What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens. It was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyond drawing attention to the curious fact that no woman had ever been permitted to inherit the Harden Library. The inspired pen of the chronicler evoked the long procession of those Hardens whose motto was Invictus; crossed-legged crusading Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, had spared it a shadowy smile.

He looked round and realized that his separation from Poppy would be disagreeably prolonged if he was expected to catalogue and arrange all the books in the Harden Library. Allowing so much time to so much space, (measuring by feet of bookshelf) hours ran rapidly to days, and days to weeks--why, months might pass and find him still labouring there. He would be buried in the blackness, forgotten by Poppy and the world. That was assuming that the Harden Library really belonged to the Hardens. And if it was to belong to Dicky Pilkington, what on earth had he been sent for?

"You were sent in answer to my letter, I suppose?"

Rickman's nervous system was still so far under the dominion of Dicky's champagne that he started violently. Double doors and double carpets deadened all sound of coming and going, and the voice seemed to have got into the room by itself. As from its softness he judged it to be still some yards distant, he suffered a further shock on finding a lady standing by his elbow.

It had been growing on him lately, this habit of starting at nothing, this ridiculous spasm of shoulder-blade, eyelids and mouth. It was a cause of many smiles to the young ladies of his boarding-house; and this lady was smiling too, though after another fashion. Her smile was remote and delicately poised; it hovered in the fine, long-drawn corners of her mouth and eyes; it sobered suddenly as a second and less violent movement turned towards her his white and too expressive face. He could not say by what subtle and tender transitions it passed into indifference, nor how in passing it contrived to intimate her regret at having taken him somewhat at a disadvantage. It was all done and atoned for in the lifting of an eyelid, before he could take in what she had actually said.

Her letter? He murmured some sort of assent, and entered on a dreamy and protracted search for his pocket handkerchief. He was miserably conscious that she was looking, looking down on him all the time. For this lady was tall, so tall indeed that her gaze seemed to light on his eyelids rather than his eyes. When he had found his courage and his handkerchief he looked up and their eyes met half way. Hers were brown with the tinge of hazel that makes brown eyes clear; they had a liquid surface of light divided from their darkness, and behind the darkness was more light, and the light and darkness were both unfathomable.

These eyes were entirely unembarrassed by the encounter. They still swept him with their long gaze, lucid, meditative, and a little critical.

"You have been very prompt."

"We understood that no time was to be lost."

She hesitated. "Mr. Rickman understood, did he not, that I asked for some one with experience?"

Most certainly Mr. Rickman understood.

"Do you think you will be able to do what I want?"

Her eyes implied that he seemed to her too young to have had any experience at all.

Knowing that a sense of humour was not one of the things required of him, he controlled a smile.

"We understood you wanted an expert, so I came myself."

"You are Mr. Rickman then?"

"Well--Mr. Rickman's son."

The lady puckered her brows as if trying to recall something, an idea, a memory that escaped her. She gave it up.

"Have you been waiting long?"

"Not more than half an hour or so."

"I am sorry. Perhaps you had better stay now and see what has to be done."

He was tired, he had eaten nothing all day, his nerves were out of order, and he had an abominable headache, but he intimated that he and his time were at her service. She spoke with authority, and he wondered who she was. Sir Frederick Harden's daughter? Or his sister? Or his wife?

"As you see, the books are fairly well arranged. It will not take very long to sort them."

Oh wouldn't it, though! His heart sank miserably as he followed her progress round the room.

"They'll have to be catalogued under their subjects--alphabetically, of course."

"Quite so."

She continued with the same swiftness and serenity, mistress of his time and intelligence, as of her own luminous and elaborate plan. "Their size will have to be given, the edition, the place and date of publication, the number of their shelf, and their place on the shelves."

Their place on the shelves indeed! If those books had got into Dicky Pilkington's clutches their place would know them no more. He wondered; did she know nothing about Dicky Pilkington? Her plan implied certainty of possession, the permanence of the Harden Library world without end. He wondered whether he ought not to remind her that it might be about to come into the market, if it were not already as good as sold?

"Besides the cataloguing I want notes on all the rare or remarkable books. I believe some of them are unique."

He wondered more and more, and ended by wondering whether Dicky Pilkington were really so sure of his game?

"I see. You want a catalogue raisonné."

"I want something like this." She opened a drawer and showed him one of Rickman's Special Quarterly Catalogues of a year back. He remembered; it used to be sent regularly to old Sir Joseph Harden, their best customer.

"My grandfather said these catalogues were models of their kind--they could only have been done by a scholar. He wanted the library catalogued on the same lines. It was to have been done in his lifetime--"

"I wish it had been. I should have liked to have worked for Sir Joseph 'Arden."

Stirred by the praise, and by a sudden recollection of Sir Joseph, he spoke with a certain emotion, so that an aitch went by the board.

"Are you quite sure," said she, "that you know all about this sort of work?"

Had she noticed that hideous accident? And did it shake her belief in his fitness for the scholarly task?

"This is my work. I made that catalogue. I have to make them every quarter, so it keeps my hand in."

"Are you a quick worker?"

"Yes, I can be pretty quick."

"Could you finish my catalogue by the twenty-seventh? That's a little more than three weeks."

"Well--it would depend rather on the number of notes you wanted. Let me see--there must be about fourteen or fifteen thousand books here--"

"There are fifteen thousand."

"It would take three weeks to make an ordinary catalogue; and that would be quick work, even for me. I'm afraid you must give me rather more time."

"I can't. I'm leaving England on the twenty-sixth."

"Couldn't I go on with it in your absence?"

"No, that would hardly do."

"If you could only give me another week--"

"I couldn't possibly. I have to join my father at Cannes on the twenty-seventh."

So she was Sir Frederick Harden's daughter then, not his wife. Her last words were illuminating; they suggested the programme of a family whose affairs were in liquidation. They also revealed Sir Frederick Harden's amazing indifference to the fate of the library, an indifference that argued a certain ignorance of its commercial value. His father who had a scent keen as a hound's for business had taken in the situation. And Dicky, you might trust Dicky to be sure of his game. But if this were so, why should the Hardens engage in such a leisurely and expensive undertaking as a catalogue raisonné? Was the gay Sir Frederick trying to throw dust in the eyes of his creditors?

"I see," he said, "Sir Frederick Harden is anxious to have the catalogue finished before you leave?"

"No, he isn't anxious about it at all. He doesn't know it's being done. It is entirely my affair."

So Sir Frederick's affairs and his daughter's were separate and distinct; and apparently neither knew what the other was about. Rickman's conscience reproached him for the rather low cunning which had prompted him to force her hand. It also suggested that he ought not to take advantage of her ignorance. Miss Harden was charming, but evidently she was a little rash.

"If I may make the suggestion, it might perhaps be wiser to wait till your return."

"If it isn't done before I go," said Miss Harden, "it may never be done at all."

"And you are very anxious that it should be done?"

"Yes, I am. But if you can't do it, you had better say so at once."

"That would not be strictly true. I could do it, if I worked at it pretty nearly all day and half the night. Say sixteen hours out of the twenty-four."

"You are thinking of one person's work?"

"Yes."

"But if there are two persons?"

"Then, of course, it would take eight hours."

"So, if I worked, too--"

"In that case," he replied imperturbably, "it would take twelve hours."

"You said eight just now."

"Assuming that the two persons worked equally hard."

She crossed to a table in the middle of the room, it was littered with papers. She brought and showed him some sheets covered with delicate handwriting; her work, poor lady.

"This is a rough catalogue as far as I've got. I think it will be some help."

"Very great help," he murmured, stung by an indescribable compunction. He had not reckoned on this complication; and it made the ambiguity of his position detestable. It was bad enough to come sneaking into her house as his father's agent and spy, and be doing his business all the while that this adorably innocent lady believed him to be exclusively engaged on hers. But that she should work with him, toiling at a catalogue which would eventually be Rickman's catalogue, there was something in the notion extremely repulsive to his sense of honour. Under its muffling of headache his mind wrestled feebly with the situation. He wished he had not got drunk last night so that he could see the thing clearly all round. As far as he could see at present the only decent course was to back out of it.

"What I have done covers the first five sections up to F."

"I see," he said with a faint interest, "you are keeping the classical and modern sections distinct."

"Yes, I thought that was better."

"Much better."

"I haven't begun the classical section yet. Can I leave that to you?"

"Certainly." He felt that every assent was committing him to he knew not what.

"You see a great deal of the work is done already. That makes a difference, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yes; it makes all the difference." And indeed it did.

"In this case you can undertake it?"

"No. I think that in this case I couldn't undertake it at all."

"But--why not?" she asked, as well she might.

Why not, indeed? He walked two or three paces from her, trying to think it out. If only his head didn't ache so abominably! To refuse to share the work with her was of course to lay himself open to a most disgusting suspicion.

He paced back again. Did she suspect him of mercenary motives? No; she suspected nothing. Her face expressed disappointment and bewilderment, so far as she allowed it to express anything. One more turn. Thank Goodness, she was not looking at him; she was giving him time. Only a second, though. She had seated herself, as much as to say she was now waiting for an explanation. He mustn't keep her waiting; he must say something, but what on earth was he going to say?

And as he looked at the lady so serenely seated, there rose up before him a sudden impertinent, incongruous vision of Miss Poppy Grace's legs. They reminded him that certain affairs of his own imperatively called him back to town. Happy thought--why not say so?

"I ought to have said that in any case I couldn't undertake it. I couldn't make time without giving up some very important engagements."

"Could you not have thought of that before you came?"

"I did think of it. I thought I could fit everything in by going up to town from Saturday to Monday. But if I'm to finish by the twenty-seventh, even--even with your help, I oughtn't to lose a day, much less three days."

"I see. You are afraid of not being able to finish?"

He wavered, selecting some form of expression that might shadow forth what was passing in his mind.

"I'm afraid of making any promises I mightn't be able to keep."

Man's vacillation is Fate's determination, and Miss Harden was as firm as Fate. He felt that the fine long hands playing with the catalogue were shaping events for him, while her eyes measured him with their meditative gaze.

"I must risk that," she said. "I should lose more than three days in finding a substitute, and I think you will do the work as I want it done."

"And supposing I can't do it in time?"

"Will you do your best--that's all?"

"Certainly; whatever I do, I shall do my best. And if I fail you--"

Left unfinished, hanging in mid air, the phrase suggested the vague phantasmal contingencies for which he could find no name.

"I am willing to take the risk."

Her phrase too was satisfying. Its generous amplitude covered him like a cloak.

"But we haven't arranged anything about terms."

No, they had not. Was it in her adorable simplicity, or in the mere recklessness of her youth, that she engaged him first and talked about terms afterwards? Or did she know an honest man when she saw one? He took his note-book and pencil and made out an estimate with the rapidity of happy inspiration, a fantastic estimate, incredibly and ludicrously small.

"Then," said she, "there will be your expenses."

He had not thought of that difficulty; but he soared above it, still reckless and inspired.

"Expenses? Oh, expenses are included."

She considered the estimate with the prettiest pucker of her meditative brows.

"I don't understand these things; but--it seems very little."

"Our usual charge."

So swiftly did the wings of his inspiration carry him into the blue ideal, high above both verbal verity and the gross material fact.

She acquiesced, though with some reluctance. "Well, and when do you think you can begin?"

"Whenever it's most convenient to you. I shall have to take a look round first."

"You can do that at once."

By this time he had forgotten that whatever he might have drunk he had eaten nothing since the dinner of last night. He had ceased to feel faint and headachy and hungry, having reached that stage of faintness, headache and hunger when the body sheds its weight and seems to walk gloriously upon air, to be possessed of supernatural energy. He went up and down library steps that were ladders, and stood perilously on the tops of them. He walked round and round the walls, making calculations, till the library began to swing slowly round too, and a thin circle of grey mist swung with it. And all the time he was obscurely aware of a delicate grey-clad figure going to and fro in the grey mist, or seated intent at the table, doing his work. He felt that her eyes followed him now and then.

Heroism sustained him for an hour. At the end of the hour his progress round the room grew slower; and in passing by the table where she sat, he had to steady himself with one hand. A cold sweat broke on his forehead. He mopped it furtively. He had every reason to believe that his appearance was repulsive; and, in the same painful instant in which this conviction sank into him, she raised her head and he saw that she was beautiful. The upward look revealed her. It was as if some veil, soft but obscuring, had dropped from her face. As her eyes scanned him gently, it occurred to him that she had probably never before had an opportunity of intimately observing a gentleman suffering from the remoter effects of intoxication.

"You look tired," she said. "Or are you ill?"

He stood shame-faced before her; for her eyes were more disconcerting than when they had looked down on him from their height. They were tranquil now, full of kind thought and innocence and candour. Of innocence above all, a luminous innocence, a piercing purity. He was troubled by her presence; but it was not so much her womanhood that troubled him as the deep mystery of her youth.

He could not look at it as it looked at him; for in looking at it he remembered last night and many nights before. Somehow it made him see the things it could not see, his drunkenness, his folly, his passion, the villainous naked body of his sin. And it was for their work, and their marks upon him, that she pitied him.

"Have you had anything to eat?" said she.

"Oh, yes, thanks," he answered vaguely.

"When?"

"Well--as far as I can remember it was about eight o'clock last night."

"Oh--how very thoughtless of me. I am so sorry."

"It's my own fault entirely. I wouldn't have mentioned it, except to account for my stupidity."

She crossed the room with a quick movement of distress and rang the bell. With horror he perceived her hospitable intention.

She was actually ordering his dinner and his room. He heard every word of her soft voice; it was saying that he was to have some soup, and the chicken, and the tart--no, the jelly, and a bottle of burgundy, in the morning-room. He saw the young footman standing almost on tip-toe, winged for service, fired with her enthusiasm and her secrecy.

Coming on that sinister and ambiguous errand, how could he sleep under her roof? How could he eat her chicken, and drink her burgundy, and sit in her morning-room? And how could he explain that he could not? Happily she left him to settle the point with the footman.

With surprise and a little concern Lucia Harden learnt that the rather extraordinary young man, Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, had betaken himself to an hotel. It appeared, that courteously, but with an earnestness that admitted of no contradiction, he had declined all hospitality whatever.

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Chapter XV

It was Friday morning, and Mr. Rickman lay in bed, outwardly beholding through the open window the divinity of the sea, inwardly contemplating the phantoms of the mind. For he judged them to be phantoms (alcoholic in their origin), his scruples of last night. Strictly speaking, it was on Wednesday night that he had got drunk; but he felt as if his intoxication had prolonged itself abnormally, as if this were the first moment of indubitable sobriety.

And as he lay there, he prepared himself to act the part of the cold, abstracted, supercilious man of business, the part already too horribly familiar to him as young Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He reflected how nearly he had wrecked his prospects in that character. He bade himself beware of woman and of drink, the two things most fatal to stability of judgement. He recalled, painfully, the events of last evening. He was not quite sure what he had done, or hadn't done; but he believed he had all but flung up the chance of securing for Rickman's the great Harden Library. And he had quite a vivid and disturbing recollection of the face, the person that had inspired him with that impulse of fantastic folly.

In the candid light of morning this view of his conduct presented itself as the sane thinking of a regenerated intellect. He realized, as he had not realized before, how colossal was the opportunity he had so narrowly let slip. The great Harden Library would come virgin into the market, undefiled by the touch of commerce, the breath of publicity. It had been the pure and solitary delight of scholar lovers who would have been insulted by the suggestion that they should traffic in its treasures. Everything depended on his keeping its secret inviolate. Heavens! supposing he had backed out of that catalogue, and Miss Harden had called in another expert. At this point he detected in himself a tendency to wander from the matter in hand. He reminded himself that whatever else he was there for, he was there to guard the virginal seclusion of the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde. He tried to shut his eyes against his vivid and disturbing vision of the lady of the library. It suggested that he was allowing that innocent person to pay fifteen pounds for a catalogue which he had some reason to believe would be of no earthly use to her. He sat up in bed, and silenced its suggestions with all the gravity of his official character. If the young lady insisted on having a catalogue made, he might as well make it as any one else; in fact, a great deal better. He tried to make himself believe that he regretted having charged her fifteen pounds when he might have got fifty. It was more than unbusiness-like; it was, even for him, an incredibly idiotic thing to do; he would never have done it if he had not been hopelessly drunk the night before.

He got out of bed with a certain slow dignity and stepped into his cold bath solemnly, as into a font of regeneration. And as he bathed he still rehearsed with brilliance his appointed part. No criticism of the performance was offered by his actual self as revealed to him in the looking-glass. It stared at him with an abstracted air, conspicuous in the helpless pathos of its nakedness. It affected absorption in the intricate evolutions of the bath. Something in its manner inspired him with a vague distrust. He noticed that this morning it soaped itself with a peculiar care, that it displayed more than usual interest in the trivial details of dress. It rejected an otherwise irreproachable shirt because of a minute wine stain on the cuff. It sniffed critically at its coat and trousers, and flung them to the other end of the room. It arrayed itself finally in a brand-new suit of grey flannel, altogether inexpressive of his rôle. He could not but feel that its behaviour compromised the dignity of the character he had determined to represent. It is not in his best coat and trousers that the book-dealer sets out on the dusty quest of the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde.

He could no longer conceal the fact that he had dressed himself elaborately for an interview with Miss Harden. But he endeavoured to adjust his mind to a new and less disturbing view of the lady. He had seen her last night through a flush of emotion that obscured her; he would see her to-day in the pure and imperturbable light of the morning, and his nerves should not play the devil with him this time. He would be cool, calm, incorruptibly impersonal, as became Rickman, the man of business, Rickman of Rickman's.

Unfortunately, though the rôle was rehearsed with ease in the privacy of his bedroom, it proved impossible to sustain it under Miss Harden's candid eyes. At the first sight of them he lost all grasp and memory of his part; he broke down disgracefully, miserably. The sound of her voice revived his agony of the previous night. True, the flush of emotion had subsided, but in the fierce intellectual light that followed, his doubts and scruples showed plainer than ever. They even acquired a certain logical order and cohesion.

He concealed himself behind the projecting wing of a bookcase and wrestled with them there. Dispassionately considered, the situation stood thus. He was possessed of certain knowledge relating to Sir Frederick Harden's affairs. That was neither bad nor good. He had allowed Sir Frederick Harden's daughter to engage him in a certain capacity, knowing perfectly well that she would not have done so had she herself possessed that knowledge. That was bad--distinctly bad. He was going to take advantage of that engagement to act in another capacity, not contemplated by his employer, namely, as valuer of said employer's property and possibly as the agent for its purchase, well knowing that such purchase would be effected without reference to its intrinsic or even to its market value. That was worse.

These were the simple data of his problem. The problem (seen with excruciating lucidity) stated itself thus. Assuming, first of all, Miss Harden's ignorance and his own knowledge, what was the correct attitude of his knowledge to her ignorance? In other words, was it his business to enlighten her as to the state of her father's finances?

No; it might be somebody else's business, but most decidedly it was not his. His business, as far as he could see it, was simply to withdraw as gracefully as possible from a position so difficult to occupy with any decency.

He must then make another attempt to back out of it. No doubt it would be an uncommonly awkward thing to do. The lady had already shown a very pretty little will of her own, and supposing she insisted on holding him to his bargain? There was that estimate, too; it seemed to have clinched things, somehow, between him and Miss Harden. He did not exactly know how to deal with that high-handed innocence, but he would ask her to allow him to re-consider it.

He approached her with his head tossed up a little more than usual, his way when he was about to do something disagreeable, to drive a bargain or to ask a favour.

"Miss Harden, may I speak to you one moment?"

She looked up. Her face and figure were radiant in the light from the south window.

"What is it?" she asked.

She was busy at one of the bookcases with a note-book and pencil, cataloguing on an absurd but independent plan of her own. He gave a rueful glance at her.

"I'm not sure that I ought to have let you engage me last night. I wonder if I might ask you--"

"To release you from your engagement?"

"You must think I'm behaving very badly."

She did not contradict him; neither did she assent. She held him for the moment under her long penetrating gaze. Her eyes were not of the detective sort, quick to penetrate disguises. They were (though she did not know it) eyes that possessed the power of spiritual seduction, luring souls to confession. Your falseness might escape them; but if there was any truth in you, she compelled you to be true.

She compelled Rickman to be impulsive.

"I'd give anything to know what I ought to do."

She did not help him out.

"I can't make up my mind about this work."

"Is it the question of time? I thought we had made that clear? You didn't undertake to finish by the twenty-seventh."

"The question is whether I should have undertaken it at all."

"It might have been as well to have answered that question first."

"I couldn't answer it. There were so many things--"

"Do you want a longer time in town?"

"I want a longer time here, to think it over, to make up my mind whether I can go on--"

"And in the meanwhile?"

"The work goes on just the same."

"And if you decide that you can't continue it?"

"I should find a substitute."

"The substitute might not be just the same. For instance, he might not have so scrupulous a conscience."

"You mean he might not be so eager to back out of his engagements."

"I mean what I said. Your position seems to be a little difficult."

"I wish to goodness, Miss Harden, I could explain it."

"I don't suggest that you should explain it. It doesn't seem to be so very clear to yourself."

"It isn't. I really don't know what I ought to do."

"No more do I. But I can tell you what you ought to have done. You ought to have made up your mind last night."

"Well, the fact is--last night--I hadn't very much mind left to make up."

"No, I remember. You were rather done up. I don't want to bind you by last night, if it's at all unfair to you."

"It isn't in the least unfair to me. But I'm not sure that it mightn't be very unfair to you; and, you see, I want to think it out."

"Very well, think it out, and let me know some time to-night. Will that satisfy you?"

"It ought to."

And for the moment it did satisfy him. He felt that conscience, that stern guardian of his conduct, was off duty for the day. He was free (for the day) to abandon himself to the charm of Miss Harden's society. The experience, he told himself, would be altogether new and delightful.

New it undoubtedly was; but he remained a little uncertain as to the delight; the immediate effect of Miss Harden's presence being an intellectual disturbance amounting almost to aberration. It showed itself, first of all, in a frightful exaltation of the consciousness of self. To Mr. Rickman, striving to be noiseless, it seemed that the sound of his boots, as he crossed the library, reverberated through the immensity of space, while the creaking of his new braces advertised in the most horrible manner his rising up and his sitting down. Things were worse when he sat down; for then his breathing, light but noticeably frequent, made him the unquiet centre of the room. In the surrounding stillness the blowing of his nose became a monstrous and appalling act. And no sooner was his attention abstracted from his nose than it settled in his throat, producing a series of spasmodic contractions which he imagined to be distinctly audible. It was really as if his body had somehow detached itself, and was rioting in a conspicuous and unseemly individuality of its own. He wondered what Miss Harden thought of its behaviour.

This state of things was bad enough when he was separated from her by the entire length of the room; but their work required a certain collaboration, and there were occasions when he was established near her, when deliberately, in cold blood and of his own initiative, he was compelled to speak to her. No language could describe the anguish and difficulty of these approaches. His way was beset by obstacles and perils, by traps and snares; and at every turn there waited for him the shameful pitfall of the aitch. He whose easy courtesy charmed away the shyness of Miss Flossie Walker, whose conversation (when he deigned to converse) was the wonder and delight of the ladies of his boarding-house, now blushed to hear himself speak. The tones of his voice were hateful to him; he detected in them some subtle and abominable quality that he had not observed before. How would they appeal to Miss Harden? For this miserable consciousness of himself was pervaded, transcended by his consciousness of her.

Of her beauty he grew every minute more aware. It was not of the conspicuous and conquering kind; it carried no flaming banner of triumphant sex; indeed, it demanded a kindred fineness of perception to discern it, being yet vague with the softness of her youth. Her hair was mere darkness without colour or flame, her face mere whiteness without a flush; all her colour and her light were, where her soul was, in her mouth and eyes. These showed more vivid for that toneless setting; they dominated her face. However he looked at her his gaze was led up to them. For the long dim lines of her body flowed upwards from her feet like the curves of a slender flame, mingling, aspiring, vanishing; the edges of her features were indistinct as the edges of a flame. This effect of an upward sweep was repeated in the tilt of her vivid mouth and emphasised by the arch of her eyebrows, giving a faintly interrogative expression to her face. All this he noticed. He noticed everything about her, from the fine curling flame-like edges of her mouth and the flawless rim of her ears, to her finger-tips and the slope of her small imperious feet. He caught every inflection of her voice; without looking at her, he was aware of every turn of her head, every movement of her eyelids; he watched with furtive interest her way of touching and handling things, of rising and sitting, of walking and being still. It was a new way, unlike Poppy's way, or Flossie's way, or the way of any woman he had yet seen. What struck him most was the intense quiet of her presence; it was this that made his own so noisy and obtrusive.

And yet, she didn't, she really didn't appear to notice it. She might have been unaware that there was any such person as Mr. Savage Keith Rickman in the room. He wondered how on earth she achieved that serene unconsciousness; he came to the conclusion that it was not her own achievement at all, but the achievement of her race. Theirs too that something subtly imperious in her bearing, which seemed not so much the attitude of her mind as the way her head was set on her shoulders. He could not say that she betrayed any sense of his social inferiority, unless it were in a certain courtesy which he gathered to be rather more finished than any she would have shown to a man of her own class.

It was not only finished, it was final. The thing was so perfect in itself that obviously it could lead no further. She would say in her exquisite voice, "Would you mind taking these five volumes back to your shelf?" or, "I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you tell me whether this is the original binding?" Under no circumstances could he imagine himself replying, "I wouldn't mind taking fifty volumes," or "I like being interrupted." All this was a complete inversion of the rules that Keith Rickman was acquainted with as governing polite intercourse between the sexes, and he found it extremely disconcerting. It was as if some fine but untransparent veil had been hung between him and her, dividing them more effectually than a barricade.

The wonder, which grew with the morning, was not so much in the things she said as in the things she didn't say. Her powers of reservation seemed to Rickman little short of miraculous. Until yesterday he had never met a woman who did not, by some look or tone or movement of her body, reveal what she was thinking about him. Whatever Miss Harden thought about him she kept it to herself. Unfortunately the same high degree of reticence was expected from him, and to Keith Rickman, when not restrained by excess of shyness, reticence came hard. It was apt to break down when a severe strain was put on it, as had been the case that morning. And it was appointed that the same thing should happen to him this afternoon.

As far as he could remember it happened in this way. He was busy getting the Greek dramatists into their places, an enterprise which frequently took him to her end of the room where Sir Joseph had established his classical library. He was sitting on the top of the steps, when she approached him carrying six vellum bound volumes in her arms, Sir Joseph's edition of Euripides of which the notes exceeded the text. He dismounted and took the books from her, turning very red as he did so.

"You should let me do all the carrying. These books are too heavy for you."

"Thank you, I think they ought to go with the others, on this shelf."

He did not answer all at once. He was absorbed in the Euripides. It was an édition de luxe, the Greek text exquisitely printed from a fount of semi-uncial type, the special glory of the Harden Classics.

He exclaimed, "What magnificent type!"

She smiled.

"It's rare too. I've never seen any other specimen--in modern printing."

"There is no other specimen," said she.

"Yes, there is. One book at least, printed, I think, in Germany."

"Is there? It was set up from a new fount specially made for this edition. I always supposed my grandfather invented it."

"Oh no, he couldn't have done that. He may have adapted it. In fact, he must have adapted it."

This young man had set aside a cherished tradition, as lightly as if he were blowing the dust off the leaves. She was interested.

"How can you tell that?"

"Oh, I know. It's very like a manuscript in the British Museum."

"What manuscript?"

"The Greek text of the Complutensian Polyglot." (He could not help saying to himself, 'That ought to fetch her!') "But it doesn't follow that it's the same type. Whatever it is, it's very beautiful."

"It's easier to read, too, than the ordinary kind."

He was still turning over the pages, handling the book as a lover handles the thing he loves. The very touch of the vellum thrilled him with an almost sensual rapture. Here and there a line flashed from a chorus and lured him deeper into the text. His impulse was still to exclaim, but a finer instinct taught him to suppress his scholarly emotion. Looking up as she spoke he saw her eyes fixed on him with a curious sympathy. And as he thought of the possible destiny of the Euripides he felt guilty as of a treachery towards her in loving the same book.

"Do you read Euripides?" he asked with naïve wonder.

"Yes."

"And Æschylus and Sophocles and Aristoph--?" Mr. Rickman became embarrassed as he recalled certain curious passages, and in his embarrassment he rushed upon his doom--"and--and 'Omer?"

It was a breakdown unparalleled in his history. Never since his childhood had he neglected the aspirate in Homer. A flush made manifest his agony. He frowned, and gazed at her steadily, as if he defied her to judge him by that lapse.

"Yes," said the lady; but she was not thinking of Homer.

"By Jove," he murmured pensively. His eyes turned from her and devoured the text. He was torn between abject admiration of the lady and of the book.

"Which do you like best?" he asked suddenly. Æschylus or Sophocles? But it's an absurd question."

"Why absurd?"

"Because they're so different."

"Are they?" To tell the truth she was not thinking of them any more than she had been thinking of Homer.

He became perfectly hectic with excitement. "Rather! Can't you see the difference? Sophocles carved his tragedies. He carved them in ivory, polished them up, back and front, till you can't see the marks of the chisel. And Æschylus jabbed his out of the naked granite where it stood, and left them there with the sea at their feet, and the mist round their heads, and the fire at their hearts."

"But--but he left the edges a little rough."

"He did. God leaves them so sometimes when he's making a big thing."

Something like a faint ripple of light passed over her face under the obscuring veil it wore for him.

"But Sophocles is perfect," said she. She was not thinking of Sophocles one bit; she was thinking that when God made Mr. Rickman he had left the edges rough, and wondering whether it was possible that he had made "a big thing."

"Oh yes, he's perfect." He began to quote softly and fluently, to her uttermost surprise. His English was at times a thing to shudder at, but his Greek was irreproachable, perfect in its modulation and its flow. Freed from all flaws of accent, the musical quality of his voice declared itself indubitably, marvellously pure.

The veil lifted. Her smile was a flash of intelligence, the sexless, impersonal intelligence of the scholar. This maker of catalogues, with the tripping tongue that Greek made golden, he had touched the electric chain that linked them under the deep, under the social gulf.

"Did you ever hear such a chorus? Pure liquid gold, every line of it. Still, you can read Sophocles with your hair on. I should have thought most worn--most ladies would like Euripides best?"

"Why? Because they understand him best?"

"No. Because he understood them best."

"Did he understand them? Euripides," said the young lady with decision, "was a decadent."

"Was he? How about the Bacchæ? Of course, it's worth all the rest of his plays put together; they're not in the same street with it. It's a thing to dream about, to go mad about."

"My grandfather says it's not Euripidean." "Good Lord! How do we know it isn't the most Euripidean of the lot?"

"Well, it stands alone, doesn't it?"

"Yes. And he stands with it."

"Does he? My grandfather was judging him by his average."

"His average? Oh, I say, you know, you could reduce some very great poets to mediocrity by striking their average. Wouldn't you allow a man to be at least as great as his greatest achievement?"

"I wonder--"

"Anyhow, those are ripping good notes in that edition."

"They ought to be. They were by a good scholar--his greatest achievement."

He put down the Harden Euripides; and it struck Lucia that if Sir Joseph had been there this truthful young man would not have hesitated to put him down too. She laid her hand on the book with an air of possession and protection, which was a lesson in tact for the truthful young man. He leaned up against the bookcase with his hands in his pockets.

"I say," said he, "I hope you don't mind my talking like this to you?"

"No. Why shouldn't you?"

"Well, it isn't exactly what I'm here for."

That exciting conversation had lasted barely fifteen minutes; but it had set him for the time being at his ease. He had at any rate proved himself a scholar, and he was so far happier. He felt that he was beginning to get on with Miss Harden, to see a little way across the gulf, discerning the outlines of the further shore where that high lady walked unveiled.

Then suddenly, owing to a most humiliating incident, the gulf yawned again.

It was five o'clock, and he was left alone in the company of a fascinating little tea-table, laid, as if for a guest, with fine white linen, silk embroidered, with early Georgian silver and old china. It was laid for him, that little tea-table. He had delayed a little before beginning his repast, and it happened that when Miss Harden appeared again she found him holding a tea-cup to his lips with one hand, while the other groped in a dish of cream cakes, abstractedly, and without the guidance of a selective eye. Both eyes indeed were gazing dreamily over the rim of the tea-cup at her empty chair. He was all right; so why, oh why did he turn brick-red and dash his cup down and draw back his innocent hand? That was what he had seen the errand boy at Rickman's do, when he caught him eating lunch in a dark passage. He always had compassion on that poor pariah and left him to finish his meal in privacy; and with the same delicacy Miss Harden, perceiving his agony, withdrew. He was aware that the incident had marked him.

He stood exactly where he stood before. Expert knowledge was nothing. Mere conversational dexterity was nothing. He could talk to her about Euripides and Sophocles till all was blue; he could not blow his nose before her, or eat and drink before her, like a gentleman, without shame and fear.

They talked no more that evening.

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Chapter XVI

At seven he again refused Miss Harden's hospitality and withdrew to his hotel. He was to return before nine to let her know his decision, and as yet he had done nothing towards thinking it out.

A letter had come for him by the evening post. It had been forwarded from his rooms and ran thus.

"My dear Rickets:

"I haven't forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne. It's going to be awfully select.

"Ever your own and nobody else's,

"Poppy Grace.

"P.S.--How is your poor head?"

There are many ways of being kind and that was Poppy's way. She wanted to tell him not to be cut up about Wednesday night; that, whatever Dicky Pilkington thought of his pretensions, she still reckoned him in the number of the awfully select. And lest he should have deeper grounds for uneasiness her postscript hinted in the most delicate manner possible that she had not taken him seriously, attributing his utterances to their true cause. And yet she was his own and nobody else's. She was a good sort, Poppy, taking her all round.

He tried to think about Poppy and found it difficult. His mind wandered; not into the realms of fancy, but into paths strange and humiliating for a scholar and a poet. He caught himself murmuring, "Harmouth--Harcombe--Homer--Harden." He had got them all right. He never dreamed of--of dropping them when he wasn't excited. It was only in the beaten tracks where his father had gone before him that he was apt to slide. He was triumphant over Harmouth where he might have tripped over Hammersmith. Homer and Hesiod were as safe with him as with Horace Jewdwine. (He couldn't think how he had managed to come to grief over Homer just now. It was nerves, or luck, or pure accident, the sort of thing that might have happened to anybody.) Thank Heaven, his tongue was almost virgin to the aitch in Harden.

Harden--Lucia Harden. He knew her name and how to pronounce it; for he had seen it written in the fly-leaf of a book, and heard it spoken by the footman who called her Miss Loocher. This he took to be a corruption of the Italian form.

Here he again tried to evoke a vivid image of Poppy; but without success. And then he remembered that he had still to think it out.

First of all, then, he would eliminate sentiment. Sentiment apart, he was by no means sure that he would do well to act on the impulse of the morning and decamp. After all, what was he sure of? Was he sure that Sir Frederick Harden's affairs, including his library, were involved beyond redemption? Put it that there was an off-chance of Sir Frederick's financial recovery.

From the bare, uninteresting, financial point of view that event would entail some regrettable consequences for himself. He had been extremely rash. He had undertaken to accomplish three weeks' expert work to the value of fifty pounds for which he had charged fifteen, an estimate that at Rickman's would have been considered ridiculous for a man's bare time. He had not so much as mentioned his fare; he had refused board and lodging; and on the most sanguine computation his fees would only cover his expenses by about five pounds. The difference between fifteen pounds and fifty would have to be refunded out of his own private pocket. When it came to settling accounts with Rickman's his position would be, to say the least of it, embarrassing. It was difficult to unravel the mental process that had led him into it; but it was not the first time that these luxurious subtleties of conscience had caused him to run short of ready money. It was only another of those innumerable occasions when he and his father failed to see face to face, and when he had had to pay for the pleasure of supporting a fantastic personal view. Only the view in this case was so hideously complicated and--and exaggerated. And this time in order to clear himself he would be compelled to borrow again from Dicky Pilkington. There was no other way. No sooner did Sir Frederick's head appear rising above water than he saw his own hopelessly submerged.

Nevertheless it was this prospect that he found himself contemplating with all the ardour of desire. It justified not only his presence in the Harden Library, but Miss Harden's presence as his collaborator. With all its unpleasantness it was infinitely preferable to the other alternative. He let his mind dwell on it until the off-chance began to look like an absolute certainty.

Put it then that Sir Frederick recovered. In this case the Hardens scored. Since he had charged Miss Harden fifteen where he was entitled to fifty, the best part of his labour might be considered a free gift to the lady. What was more, in the matter of commission, he stood to lose a very considerable sum. Put it that the chances were even, and the whole business resolved itself into a game of pitch and toss. Heads, Miss Harden lost; tails, she won; and he wasn't responsible for the tossing.

But put it that Sir Frederick did not recover. Then he, Keith Rickman, was in a position most unpleasant for himself; but he could not make things a bit pleasanter for Miss Harden by wriggling out of it. The library would be sold whether he stayed there or not; and by staying he might possibly protect her interests in the sale. It wasn't a nice thing to have to be keeping his eye all the time on the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde; but he would only be doing what must be done by somebody in any case. Conclusion; however unpleasant for him to be the agent for the sale, it would be safer for Miss Harden.

And how about those confounded profits, represented by his commission? That was easily settled. He would have nothing to do with the filthy things. He wouldn't touch his commission with the end of the poker. Unfortunately he would never be able to explain all this to her, and Heaven only knew what she would think of him when it all came out in the long-run, as it was bound to come. Well, it wouldn't matter what she thought of him so long as he knew that his hands were clean. Rickman's' hands might not be so presentable, but they were not human hands as his were; they were the iron, irresponsible hands of a machine.

There remained his arrangements for the Bank holiday. They seemed to have been made so long ago that they hardly counted. Still, there was that engagement to Poppy Grace, and he had promised to take poor Flossie to the Hippodrome. Poor Flossie would be disappointed if he did not take her to the Hippodrome. At the moment Flossie's disappointment presented itself as considerably more vital than his own.

To-morrow, then, being Saturday, he would go up to town; and on Monday he would return to his ambiguous post.

He had thought it out.

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Chapter XVII

"There's a lot of rot," said Mr. Rickman, "talked about Greek tragedy. But really, if you come to think of it, it's only in Sophocles you get the tragedy of Fate. There isn't any such thing in Æschylus, you know."

He had gone up to acquaint Miss Harden with his decision and had been led off into this hopeful track by the seductions that still lurked in the Euripides.

"There's Nemesis, which is the same thing," said she.

"Not at all the same thing. Nemesis is simply the horrid jealousy of the gods; and the responsibility lies with the person who provokes them, whether it's Prometheus, or Agamemnon, or Agamemnon's great great grandfather. It's the tragedy of human responsibility, the most brutal tragedy of all. All these people are crumpled up with it, they go about tearing their hair over it, and howling out [Greek: drasanti pathein]. There isn't any Fate in that, you know. Is there?"

He did not wait for an answer.

"In Sophocles now, it's all the other way about. His people aren't responsible in the least. They're just a thundering lot of lunatics. They go knocking their poor heads against the divine law, and trying to see which is the hardest, till they end by breaking both. There's no question of paying for the damage. It's pure Fate."

"Well--and Euripides?"

"Oh, Euripides goes on another tack altogether. There aren't any laws to break, yet everybody's miserable all round, and nobody's responsible. It's [Greek: tô pathonti pathein]. They suffer because they suffer, and there's an end of it. And it's the end of Fate in Greek tragedy. I know this isn't the orthodox view of it."

He paused, a little out of breath, for he had talked as usual against time, leaving behind him a luminous trail of ideas struck out furiously as he rushed along. His excitement was of the strong-winged kind that carried him triumphantly over all obstacles, even the barrier of the aitch.

Was she listening?

She was; but as she listened she looked down, and her fingers played with the slender gold chain that went twice round her throat and fell among the laces of her gown. On her mouth there was the same smile he had seen when he first saw her; he took it for a smile of innermost amusement. It didn't lurk; there was nothing underhand about it. It hovered, delicately poised for flight.

"Euripides," she said, "had the deeper insight, then. He knew that character is destiny."

"That character is destiny? Whose character? For all I know your character may be my destiny."

It was one of those unconsidered speeches, flashed out in the heat of argument, which nevertheless, once uttered are felt to be terrific and momentous. He wondered how Miss Harden would take it. She took it (as she seemed to take most things) calmly.

"No character could have any power over you except through your own."

"Perhaps not. All the same, you are not me, you are something outside. You would be my destiny."

He paused again. Personalities were pitfalls which he must avoid. No such danger existed for the lady; she simply ignored it; her mind never touched those deeper issues of the discussion where his floundered, perilously immersed. Still she was not unwilling to pursue the theme.

"It all depends," said she, "on what you mean by destiny."

"Well, say I mean the end, the end I'm moving towards, the end I ultimately arrive at--"

"Surely that depends on your character, your character, of course, as a whole."

"It may or mayn't. It may depend on what I eat or don't eat for dinner, on the paper I take in or the pattern of my waistcoat. And the end may be utterly repellent to my character as a whole. Say I end by adopting an unsuitable profession. Is that my character or my destiny?"

"Your character, I think, or you wouldn't have adopted it."

"H'm. Supposing it adopts me?"

"It couldn't--against your will."

"No. But my will in this instance might not be the expression of my character as a whole. Why, I may be doing violence to my character as a whole by--by the unique absurdity that dishes me. That's destiny, if you like, but it's not character--not my character, anyhow."

Personalities again. Whither could he flee from their presence? Even the frigid realm of abstractions was shaken by the beating of his own passionate heart. Her eyes had the allurements of the confessional; he hovered, fascinated, round the holy precincts, for ever on the brink of revelation. It was ungovernable, this tendency to talk about himself. In another minute--But no, most decidedly that was not what he was there for.

If it came to that, what was he there for? It was so incredible that he should be there at all. And yet there he was going to stay, for three weeks, and more. He had come to tell her so.

Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone conclusion.

"It is settled, then?" said she, "you will have no more scruples?"

"None."

"There's only one thing. I must ask you not to give anybody any information about the library. We don't want to be bothered with dealers and collectors. Some of the books are so valuable that we should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known. Can you keep the secret?"

His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde. But he pledged himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy. Why not? He was a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other dealers in the dark. It was an entirely sensible and business-like pledge. And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable. He had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman's. If it were Miss Harden's interest that he should defend that secret from his own father, he would have to defend it. He had given his word; and for the life of him he could not tell why.

In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and unforeseen. He had said to her, "Your character may be my destiny." And perhaps it was. He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from outside himself, rather than from within. And yet, as he sat there feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogue raisonné, he decided further that he would not go away at all.

He would not go back to town to-morrow. He could not afford the time. He must and would finish that catalogue raisonné by the twenty-seventh. He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden. Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more. For he and she could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic assumption that the library was hers. Such a pledge would, he imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden met face to face. And on him it was conceivably more binding than the promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or to intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss Poppy Grace. Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more trivial and the grosser claim. His word to Miss Harden was one of those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of the actual. To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the great three days.

He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town by the river path at the bottom of the garden. Half-way to the river he stopped and looked back. The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope of glimmering lawn. The house loomed in the background, a grey mass with blurred outlines. From a window open in the east wing he could hear the sound of a piano.

He stood still and listened. All around was the tender, indescribable Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night, dividing the darkness. It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult, rhythmic and controlled. What was she playing? If he stayed till midnight he must hear it through. Night sheltered him, and he drew nearer lest he should lose a note. He stretched himself on the lawn, and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata Appassionata.

It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not tell him why he was there and what he was there for.

And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.

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Chapter XVIII

It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn. He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life that he knew not and that knew not him.

"Lucia--Lucia!" Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition standing in the south window. "Lu-chee-a!--" it pleaded. "You can't say you're out when I can see perfectly well that you're in."

"Go away Kitty, I'm busy."

"You've no business to be busy at five o'clock in the afternoon."

Miss Kitty Palliser's body was outside the window, but her head, crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was already within the room.

"I'm dying of thirst," she said; "take me in and be kind to me and give me tea."

Lucia rose and went to the window, reluctant but resigned. Scraps of their conversation floated down to Mr. Rickman's end of the room.

"Yes, you may well look at my hat."

"I wasn't looking at it, I was looking through it."

"Well, if you can see through my hat, Lucia, you can see through me. What do you think of it?"

"Of the hat? Oh, the hat is a poem."

"Isn't it? Did you ever see anything so inspired, so impassioned?"

"Inspired, but--don't you think--just a little, a little meaningless?"

"Meaningless? It's packed with meaning."

"I should like to know what it means."

"If it means nothing else it means that I've been going to and fro the whole blessed afternoon, paying calls in Harmouth for my sins."

"Poor Kitty."

"The last three times I paid calls in Harmouth," said poor Kitty, "I sported a cycling skirt, the blousiest of blouses, and a tam-o'shanter over my left ear. Of course everybody was in. So I thought if I went like this--brand new frock--swagger hat--white gloves--that everybody would be out."

"And were they?"

"No. Just like my luck--they were all--all in!"

"And yet you have the audacity to come here and ask for tea?"

"For Goodness' sake, don't talk of tea."

"I thought you were so thirsty."

"So I am. I thirst for amusement."

"Kitty! You've been amusing yourself all afternoon--at other people's expense."

"Yes. It's cheap--awfully cheap, but fatiguing. I don't want to amuse myself; I want to be amused."

Mr. Rickman took a longer look at the brilliant apparition.

Now, at a little distance, Miss Palliser passed as merely an ordinary specimen of a brilliant but conventional type. This effect was an illusion produced by her irreproachably correct attire. As she drew nearer it became apparent that convention could never have had very much to do with her. Tailor and milliner were responsible for the general correctness of Miss Palliser's appearance, Miss Palliser herself for the riot and confusion of the details. Her coat, flung open, displayed a tangle of laces disposed after her own fancy. Her skirts, so flawless and sedate, swept as if inspired by the storm of her long-legged impetuous stride. Under her too, too fashionable hat her brown hair was twisted in a way entirely her own; and fashion had left untouched the wild originality of her face. Bumpy brows, jutting eyebrows, and nose long in the bridge, wide in the nostril, tilted in a gentle gradient; a wide full-lipped nervous mouth, and no chin to speak of. A thin face lit by restless greenish eyes; stag-like, dog-like, humorous and alert.

Miss Palliser sent the gaze of those eyes round the room. The hungry, Satanic humour in them roved, seeking what it might devour. It fell upon Mr. Rickman.

"What have you got there?"

Miss Harden's reply was inaudible.

"Let me in. I want to look at it."

"Don't, Kitty." Apparently an explanation followed from Miss Harden. It also was inaudible.

"Lu-chee-a.! Where is Miss Roots, B.A.?"

"Please, please, Kitty. Do go into the morning-room."

This painful scene was cut short by Robert, who announced that tea was served.

"Oh joy!" said Miss Palliser, and disappeared.

Lucia, following, found her examining the tea-tray.

"Only two cups," said Miss Palliser. "Isn't it going to get any tea then?"

"Isn't what going to get any tea?"

"It. The man thing you keep in there."

"Yes. But it doesn't get it here."

"I think you might ask it in. It might amuse me."

Lucia ignored the suggestion.

"I haven't talked," said Miss Palliser, "to a man thing for ages."

"It hasn't come to be talked to. It's much too busy."

"Mayn't it come in, just for a treat?"

Lucia shook her head.

"What's it like? Is it nice to look at?"

"No--yes--no."

"What? Haven't you made up your mind yet?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"Lucia, you're a perfect dog in the manger. You don't care a rap about the creature yourself, and yet you refuse to share it with your friend. I put it to you. Here we are, you and I, living in a howling wilderness untrodden by the foot of man, where even curates are at a premium--is it right, is it fair of you, to have a presentable man-thing in the house and to keep it to yourself?"

"Well--you see, it--it isn't so very presentable."

"Rubbish, I saw it. It looked perfectly all right."

"That," said Lucia, "is illusion. You haven't heard it speak."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing--nothing. Only it isn't exactly what you'd call a gentleman."

"Oh. Well, I think you might have told me that before."

"I've been trying to tell you."

Kitty reflected a moment. "So it's making a catalogue, is it? Whose bright idea is that?"

"It was grandpapa's. It's mine now." She did not mention that it was also Horace Jewdwine's.

"And what will your little papa say?"

"He won't say anything. He never does. The library's mine--mine to do as I like with."

"You've broken the spell. Isn't there some weird legend about women never inheriting it?"

"Well, they never have. I shall be the first."

"I say, if I were you, I should feel a little creepy."

"I do--sometimes. That's one reason why I want to get this thing made in my lifetime, before I go away."

"Good gracious. You're not going away to die."

"I don't know what I'm going away to do. Anyhow, the catalogue will be done. All ready for Horace when he steps into my shoes."

"Unless--happy thought--you marry him. That, I suppose, is another pair of shoes?"

There was a pause, during which Miss Palliser gazed thoughtfully at her friend.

"What have you been doing to yourself? You look most awfully tired."

"I've been sitting up rather late the last few nights, cataloguing."

"What on earth did you do that for?"

"Because I want to finish by the twenty-seventh."

There was a pause while Miss Palliser ate tea-cake.

"Is Horace coming down before you go?"

"No. He's too busy. Besides, he never comes when father isn't here."

"Oh dear no, he doesn't think it proper. It's odd," said Miss Palliser, looking down at her tea-cake with an air of profound philosophic reflection. "You can't ask your cousin to stay with you, because it's improper; but it isn't improper to sit up making catalogues with young Mr. Thing-um-a-jig till all hours of the night."

"Why should it be improper?"

"For Goodness' sake don't ask me. How should I know? Don't you find yourself wishing sometimes that Mr. Thing-um-a-jig was Mr. Jewdwine?"

"More tea, Kitty?"

"Rather! I'm going into the library to choose a book when I've finished my tea. I shall take the opportunity of observing for myself whether Mr.--Mr.--"

"Mr. Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord deliver us! Whether Mr. Savage Keith Rickman is a proper person for you to know. That reminds me. Dearest, do you know what they talk about in Harmouth? They talk about you. Conversation jiggers round you like a silly moth round a candle. Would you like to know what Harmouth thinks of you?"

"No. I haven't the smallest curiosity."

"I shall tell you all the same, because it's good for you to see yourself as others see you. They say, dear, that you do put on such a thundering lot of side. They say that attitude is absurd in one so young. They say you ought to marry, that if you don't marry you can't possibly hope to keep it up, and they say you never will marry if you continue to be so exclusive. Exclusive was the word. But before I left they'd married you to Mr. Jewdwine. You see dear, you're so exclusive that you're bound to marry into your own family, no other family being good enough."

"It's certainly a new light on my character."

"I ought to tell you that Mrs. Crampton takes a charitable view. She says she doesn't believe you really mean it, dear, she thinks that you are only very, very shy. She has heard so much about you, and is dying to know you. Don't be frightened, Lucia, I was most discreet."

"How did you show your discretion?"

"I told her not to die. I tried to persuade her that she wouldn't love you so much if she did know you."

"Kitty, that wasn't very kind."

"It was the kindest thing I could think of. It must soothe her to feel that this exclusiveness doesn't imply any reflection on her social position, but merely a weird unaccountable dislike. How is it that some people can't understand that your social position is like your digestion or the nose on your face, you're never aware of either, unless there's something wrong with it."

"Kitty, you're not in a nice mood this afternoon."

"I know I'm not. I've been in Harmouth. Lucy, there are moments when I loathe my fellow-creatures."

"Poor things. Whatever have they been doing now?"

"Oh, I don't know. The same old thing. They make my life a burden to me?"

"But how?"

"They're always bothering me, always trying to get at you through me. They're always asking me to tea to meet people in the hope that I'll ask them back to meet you. I'm worn out with keeping them off you. Some day all Harmouth will come bursting into your drawing-room over my prostrate form, flattened out upon the door-mat."

"Never mind."

"I wouldn't, sweetheart, if they really cared about you. But they don't. If you lost your money and your social position to-morrow they wouldn't care a rap. That's why I hate them."

"Why do you visit them if you hate them?"

"Because, as I told you, I hunger and thirst for amusement, and they do amuse me when they don't make me ill."

"Dear Kitty, I'm sure they're nicer than you think. Most people are, you know."

"If you think so, why don't you visit them?" snapped Kitty.

"I would, if--"

"If they ceased to be amusing; if they broke their legs or lost their money, or if they got paralytic strokes, or something. You'd visit them in their affliction, but not in the ordinary playful circumstances of life. That's because you're an angel. I," said Miss Palliser sententiously, "am not. Why do I always come to you when I feel most hopelessly the other thing?"

Lucia said something that had a very soothing effect; it sounded like "Skittles!" but the word was "Kitti-kin!"

"Lucy, I shouldn't be such a bad sort if I lived with you. I've been here exactly twenty minutes, and I've laid in enough goodness to last me for a week. And now," said Miss Palliser with decision, "I'm going."

Lucia looked up in some trepidation.

"Where are you going to?"

"I am going--to choose that book."

"Oh, Kitty, do be careful."

"I am always careful," said Miss Palliser, "in choosing a book."

In about ten minutes' time she returned. Her chastened mood had vanished.

"Lucia," said she, "you have an immense regard for that young man."

"How do you know that I have an immense regard for him?"

"I suppose you expect me to say that I can tell by your manner. I can't. Your manner is perfection. It's by Robert's manner that I judged. Robert's manner is not perfection; for a footman, you know, it's a shade too eager, too emotional."

"That, to my mind, is the charm of Robert."

"Still, there are drawbacks. A footman's face ought not to betray the feelings of his mistress. That's how I knew that Mabel Flosser was cooling off--by the increasing frostiness of Blundell. I shall feel sure of you, Lucia, as long as Robert continues to struggle against his fascinating smile. Take my advice--if you should ever cherish a secret passion, get rid of Robert, for, sure as fate, he'll give you away. Perhaps," she added meditatively, it was a little mean of me."

"Kitty, what have you been up to?"

"It was your fault. You shouldn't be so mysterious. Wishing to ascertain your real opinion of Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, I watched Robert as he was bringing in his tea."

"I hope he was properly attentive."

"Attentive isn't the word for it. He may have felt that my eye was upon him, and so got flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the thing. He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him. That won't do, you know. He'll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the Savage Keith. Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant."

"He is, as it happens, excessively observant."

"So I found out. I found out all sorts of things."

"What things?"

"Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious. He doesn't waste time. He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other; which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance. Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?"

"What a shame."

"Yes. I'm afraid he'll have to do a little re-copying."

"Oh, Kitty, why couldn't you leave the poor thing in peace?"

"There wasn't any peace to leave him in. Really, you'd have thought that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the Act. He couldn't have been more excited if I'd caught him in his bath. Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty."

"Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you. You might have had the decency to go away."

"There wouldn't have been any decency in going away. Flight would have argued that I shared the theory of his guilt. I stayed where I was for two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away--to the other end of the room."

"You should have gone away altogether."

"Why? The library is big enough for two. It's so big that you could take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of it at the other. I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him at his."

"In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly could."

"I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything. I did it on purpose. I am nothing if not subtle. You would have crushed him with a delicate and ladylike retreat; I left him as happy as he could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue."

"And then?"

"Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go. But before I went I made another discovery. You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to look at. Adieu, my exclusive one."

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